Shannon Palmer: Criminalization and the damage done

"Fight Real Power"

Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse, Phoenix (November 2010)
Chalk Art by Peggy Plews Photo by Robert Haasch

Slightly updated and edited.
Originally Posted 9/15/10.

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I've done a bit more research this week, and heard from Shannon Palmer's family, so wanted to update folks on his story. It's pretty heartbreaking. I hope the following information answers a lot of the questions people have had. I still have more, myself, as does Shannon's family, of course; we have a ways to go.

It's clear to me from my conversations with people this week and letters from prison that we need to really mobilize on behalf of these prisoners with mental illness, regardless of how they got criminalized. They're getting killed or left to die without adequate treatment in there. I keep hearing that they're being taken off their meds and put into environments where they're more likely to suicide and acutely vulnerable to predators. We have to insist that they get better psychiatric care as well as protection, or they'll keep dying as they have been.

What I saw when I worked with the homeless in Ann Arbor - and what I think I'm seeing in the prisons now - is that people with serious mental illness make attractive victims to people, especially those doing killings for status. The mentally ill don't tend to be gang members so other prisoners won't intervene or retaliate, their aggravated symptoms provide abusers with the excuse of provocation for hurting them, and the state is less likely to seek the death penalty if the victim can be readily dehumanized like Shannon was.

At worst, guys like Rushing may lose their TV and phone privileges, get sentenced to life where they've already made their home, and end up assigned to a one-man cell - in addition to gaining the esteem of their twisted friends. In other words, for killing someone like Shannon, they stand to gain more than they lose - especially if they're already in prison for murder. I'm not advocating the death penalty here - I'm advocating prevention. Rushing was also mentally ill and not getting treatment, according to family. He had been begging the ADC to protect, as had Shannon. So they put them in a cell together where no one but other prisoners could hear either of them scream...

This is fairly urgent now, since gang members and random sadists will feel they have to top this last murder with something even more grisly. Prisoners and their families are rightfully terrified that they aren't safe from them - and the ADC seems to be quick to confirm that they won't assure anyone's safety in their custody. That, frankly, should be one of the primary things they try to guarantee - especially for the most vulnerable and disabled of their prisoners. The environment, after all, is supposed to be under their control.

I'll post more soon on how and where we might connect to take more collective action. In the meantime, if you're interested in this issue for any reason - especially if you have a loved one in prison - contact me. My number is 480-580-6807.

That said, much of what follows I originally posted as comments in response to the Phoenix New Times article touching on Shannon's murder; what a disappointment, considering that they're the most progressive paper the Valley has. I'm pretty much taking what I left there and pasting it here verbatim, or I'd never get this stuff up, so keep in mind that I'm either addressing the author of the PNT article and the editors of the paper, or responding to one of the other readers who left a remark. Thank you to those folks who spoke up there on behalf of victimized prisoners, far too many of whom have psychiatric or developmental disabilities.

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First, however, an excerpt from an email that Shannon's sister, Dawn, sent to me yesterday, with her permission.
"...Last Friday, September 10, my mother received a call at 2:00 p.m. notifying her of my brother’s death and was told no details were available at this time. She was informed she would be contacted at a later date with more information once the investigation was complete, but confirmed it was a homicide. That call never came.

To add further insult to injury, my mother had to hear about the details of my brother’s death from the news media, Channel 5. On Saturday, September 11, unable to sleep, she turned on the TV, and there on the news was my brother’s pictures with the horrific news of how he died and the details of his cellmate who committed the crime along with details of his violent past.

We are outraged that they put a violent criminal in with my brother, who as you stated, had no history of violence. My mother has been fighting the system for years trying to get my brother the proper medication and care while incarcerated, to no avail. Prior to this event, my brother was taken off medication all together. The prison Dr. communicated he no longer required medication. How does a Paranoid Schizophrenic person with a long history of the illness no longer need medication?

Shannon's voice may be silent, but ours is not. We will fight to change the prison system policies in how inmates are housed and getting the proper care. He should never have been in prison in the first place..."

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Comment posted by me to the lousy Phoenix New Times article about Shannon's death

September 13, 2010.

"Wow, New Times, this is a really disturbing article. Do your homework next time. Shannon Palmer was mentally disabled, in prison for petty bullshit instead of in a hospital, and never should have been housed with a sociopathic killer. The method his cellmate, Jasper Rushing used to end his life was intended to humiliate and torture him. You needn't help him inflict that same kind of suffering on his family by publishing your sarcastic musings. They'll be reading this article as they try to make sense of what happened, of course, as well as the mindless comments sure to follow. Survivors tend to linger over these things, especially when there's nothing else but a criminal record left as a public narrative of their loved one's life.

This didn't just happen to Shannon Palmer, either - just about every prisoner and their family will feel the reverberations of stigma and shame your remarks have left and invited others to join in. I doubt anyone would be joking if this man wasn't already discounted as nothing more than a criminal who probably got what was coming to him.

Palmer was in prison because of behavior secondary to his mental illness, which was most likely not being properly treated there. He was so impaired that it took three competency exams and extensive psychiatric treatment to get him to where the judge could accept his guilty plea and sentence him.

According to family members of other prisoners at Lewis, Palmer and his cellmate were in a space built for only one man and his property; the less-dominant prisoner would have been relegated to the floor and had his property removed. What should have been only a 24-hour "transitional" housing assignment turned into nearly a month of them being crammed together.

Take a look at Palmer's in-prison infractions - gambling and disobeying orders. Now look at his cellie's record. No comparison. Talk about being set up to be murdered. I just got a letter from another ADC mentally ill prisoner who is terrified that the same thing will happen to him - and I can't assure him that it won't.

This murder was brutal, senseless, tragic, and in no way imaginable was it deserved. It was also avoidable, once again, if the ADC had been following their own policies. I could use your help doing real research into what's happening with the ADC to prevent more of these vulnerable prisoners from being murdered. At the very least, don't help cultivate a climate in our community which dehumanizes this man further and joins his killer in laughing about his death. Support his family in their grief, instead, and help the rest of us retain our own humanity by protecting the most vulnerable, most disenfranchised among us from the very real evil of our ignorance and indifference."

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Also added to the Phoenix New Times website on September 14 (with a few extra remarks). I found the Republic article on his "criminal damage" after speaking with his family.

"This is the "crime" that Shannon was given three years in prison for, only to be tortured and murdered for after doing two. His "victim" was a utility tower, which we seem to think should have more rights than he did as the accused. According to his family, Shannon climbed it in a thunderstorm because God told him to.

The real perpetrators of "criminal damage" to a human life were the Mesa police, for booking him on criminal charges instead of taking him to a hospital; the judge, Connie Contes for imposing the sentence of prison as if she was doing him a favor; the prosecutor, Clint Heiner for offering such a sweet plea deal in the first place, and the rest of us for being oblivious or indifferent to the fact that this kind of thing happens to the mentally ill in our community all the time..."

His defense attorney must have been pretty lousy, too.

Some "rescue."

Shannon's prior prison sentences, by the way - making him one of those "repeat offenders" that the ADC and the AZ Prosecuting Attorney lobbyists insist should be incarcerated for the sake of public safety - were also for the crime of having a mental illness. I think we actually sent him off to prison this last time for the delusion that, if he tried, he could get closer to God. That's a pretty sad commentary on this community and state.

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August 25, 2008. Arizona Republic:

"Police on Tuesday identified a man who climbed nearly 100 feet up a high-tension electrical tower during a thunderstorm Monday night. Police persuaded Shannon Palmer, 38, to climbed safely back to the ground after they were called about 6:20 p.m.

The Mesa Fire Department responded to reports of a man climbing the tower near 1800 East Covina Street as a storm was rolling through, Chief Mike Dunn said.

When they arrived Palmer appeared agitated, but after shutting off the power to the unit, a Technical Rescue Team, which specializes in high-angle rescue, coaxed him to a ladder truck bucket and he was brought down.

The man was returned without injury to the ground shortly after 8 p.m. with no explanation for why he had climbed the tower in the first place. The man was released to the custody of the Mesa Police Department. He was booked on suspicion of trespassing, criminal damage and disorderly conduct."

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KPHO's 2008 interview they did with Shannon in jail shortly after his above arrest, explaining why he climbed the tower and should be in a hospital, not go to prison. I just don't understand why we sent him to prison. We do that far too often here.

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Here's Shannon's sentencing record: http://www.courtminutes.maricopa.gov/docs/Criminal/092009/m3875287.pdf

I read it and wept...


Then I mailed all of this to his sentencing judge, Connie Contes. They need to be held accountable on the bench for what happens to the vulnerable folks they send off to prison with the truly dangerous and predatory ones. They should be lobbying the AZ legislature themselves for serious sentencing reform and mental health care funding - why aren't they out in front?


Shannon never should have been criminally prosecuted, much less imprisoned and drugged without trial for almost a year - breaking him of his determination to defend his innocence any longer. After enduring the restoration process under Arpaio's tender loving care, everyone just wants to go to prison to get out of that hell hole instead of fighting anymore - which amounts to lingering until you leave or die. No wonder, given how they treat people in the psychiatric Unit of the Lower Buckeye Jail in particular.

Sanity, mental illness, and "crime".

The note at the end of this post came into my box last night on a wave of hushed grief, asking to be placed where it might be found by the family of Shannon Palmer, and those in his community who responded to his killer with outrage and condemnation. It contains condolences from someone who knew and loved Jasper Rushing before he grew severely disturbed and took his first victim's life. It does not argue that he did no wrong. Rather, it just implores the rest of us to understand that he, too, has suffered, and was lost long ago.

I slept very little after contemplating the significance of this assertion that Rushing might have been a victim of the kind of disorder that claims the innocent and vulnerable I fight for, too. I had already done my share of dehumanizing him, branding him as a twisted sociopath, presuming his character and guilt were clear by his history, his access to Shannon, his method of torture, and his soulless gaze into the camera at the ADC. I stopped just short of arguing that he get the death penalty, I found his crime so heinous. No way was he in the same class as Shannon, my own loved one, or me.

I can't imagine that Shannon's killer could have executed him in the manner he chose if he had any sort of conscience or humanity left in his being. Yet I don't doubt the sincerity of the author of this note who tells us that Rushing was once a good kid who underwent some kind of horrible transformation, and that even as a hardened killer in prison he was living in fear.

Searching the internet I could find nothing but court calendars to reference Rushing's history of kidnapping and premeditated murder, preceded by more petty crimes and drug abuse. I couldn't even find news accounts of his most serious crimes or convictions. Buried in those case entries, however, is evidence that others saw a psychiatric illness emerging over a decade ago - before the first time he killed someone - compelling more than one judge to order a competency exam before sentencing him.

Not everyone who is ordered to undergo a competency exam has a disabling mental illness, nor is everyone with a psychiatric disorder automatically exempt from the consequences of harming others. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM IV) that mental health professionals use to label social deviants includes antisocial personality disorders and classifications for pedophiles, which are often associated with very serious predatory behavior. Those are not what advocates usually refer to as "serious mental illnesses" - we're most often talking about mood and thought disorders like manic-depression and schizophrenia, not severe personality disorders. People with diagnoses in the former category are far more often victims than perpetrators of violent crime.

Nevertheless, like it or not, the truth is that sometimes people who do violence to others are suffering from serious mental illness, their ability to exercise good judgment often compounded by the use of drugs or alcohol. In fact, it would be hard to look at Shannon's murder alone and suggest that his killer was in any way "well". Most certainly there's some kind of pathology underlying his actions; I just don't know what kind of pathology it is, though sadism comes to mind. He doesn't strike me as just being fearful - that murder was vicious.

Even if Rushing had a psychotic break in his youth and developed schizophrenia, that should not overshadow the fact that the vast majority of Americans with a psychiatric disability are non-violent individuals contributing to the life of our communities and the well-being of our families. You wouldn't know that we're nuts just by looking at us or the surface of our lives. Unfortunately, however, it's people like Jasper Rushing who grab the headlines and threaten to define us, not victims like Shannon Palmer, or survivors like me. Seldom is a big deal made of the psychiatric status of vindictive, selfish, greedy people who violate others horribly while perfectly "sane". That's who we really need to beware of.

It is true that untreated mental illness can cause symptoms that "endanger self or others": severe paranoia, auditory hallucinations, agitation, poor impulse control, delusional thinking, grandiosity, emotional detachment, terror, and despair. For that reason we have laws that require involuntary hospitalization and compulsory outpatient treatment for people who - left untreated - may become a danger to the rest of us or kill themselves.

So many of the mentally ill attempt to self-medicate, too, which often aggravates our symptoms, resulting in disastrous consequences - including the trans-institutionalization from mental health settings to places like shelters, jails and prisons for a range of criminalized behavior that has as much to do with poverty as it has to do with the nature of one's disability.

Over the course of the past 30 years it's been increasingly hard to get someone who needs psychiatric care into an inpatient setting, a group home, or a public outpatient clinic that has the capacity to really help them be "well", because the profoundly disabling nature of mental illness forces them to depend on public resources. As those budgets have shrunk and affordable housing has disappeared, people with psychiatric disabilities have been dumped into the streets to fend for themselves, suffering a multitude of traumas on top of whatever inner demons already torment them.

In the same period of time, the numbers of people with mental illness in America who have been put behind bars has risen exponentially. The Huffington post has an interesting video and links to other articles that address this.

I worked with the the homeless mentally ill for over a decade in Ann Arbor, and saw more go through the criminal justice system that into the mental health system because jails and prisons were the only doors the community was willing to pay to hold open for them anymore All other avenues to seek "safety" from the streets and shelters or "help" for their symptoms had been systematically closed off, and mental health and criminal codes were revised to reflect society's determination to punish our deviants, public nuisances and eyesores with jail and - for repeat offenders of even petty crimes - with prison.

Do not be mistaken about what prison in America is, by the way - it can be horribly brutal, even if you don't end up getting killed.

With public mental health dollars shrinking, the laws that were originally intended to protect the civil liberties of the mentally disabled were used to justify denying them their rights to humane, life-saving treatment, contributing to their rising rate of criminalization and incarceration. Many people in mental health and on the front end of the criminal justice system have resigned themselves to the notion that if someone needs intensive psychiatric intervention to protect them or others, the only way they'll get it is as a convicted criminal. That's such a tragic myth, as is the one that addicts will get the treatment they need in prison, too.

By the AZ Department of Corrections' own count at the end of last month, 9,362 of their 40,204 prisoners were individuals requiring on-going mental health services. Only a handful in AZ state prisons have access to anything more than an MD who might prescribe the right psychiatric meds, however. They're otherwise left to fend for themselves and cope with their illness and the terror of their environment, which the rate of suicides and homicide victims among them suggests is not an easy feat. The only "treatment" out of the norm that many end up getting is placement in solitary confinement or cages as a behavior management tool or outright punishment for their inability to adapt. Isolation is not a therapeutic intervention. It is known to make the sane go mad.

Jasper Rushing perpetrated horrible murders over the course of his adult life; I have no idea why. That doesn't make him any less a victim of neglect, however, if he wasn't getting the care he needed for whatever psychiatric disorder he had. That means that Shannon is a victim of both Jasper Rushing and the AZ Department of Corrections. The two men were locked into the same modified one-man cell, each one, by their family's accounts, fearful and not doing well.

From what I've seen and heard, that's not an isolated exception to an otherwise functional system. The ADC has a pattern of discontinuing necessary psychiatric meds and housing symptomatic prisoners in poorly supervised, over-populated dorms or in close quarters with people not likely to put up with them. When placed in higher security yards and cells - presumably because someone had concerns about their behavior and ability to be safe - it appears as if the seriously mentally ill are simply being contained, not cared for. Marcia Powell, after all, was supposed to be on a 10-minute suicide watch, and look at what happened to her. Even exposed in a cage in the middle of the yard, 20 feet from an air-conditioned station for guards, no one looked out for her welfare.

We can - and should - each pressure the ADC, directly or through our elected officials, to reform their system such that people with mental illness don't keep dying off as they are. We should also forward our concerns about the safety and welfare of loved ones in the prisons - regardless of their crime or disability - to the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, asking for a CRIPA investigation into the patterns underlying the murders, suicides, and neglect. But the most effective tool for long-lasting change would be new legislation that assures critical rights and remedies to prisoners to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the first place.

We also need to reform this legal system which criminalizes and imprisons people for the symptoms of their illness, as Shannon was for climbing a utility tower. Such reform also necessitates that resources exist in the community to provide adequate treatment and housing for those at risk of being inappropriately criminalized without it. The price of imprisonment, as I hope people see by now, is paid not only in tax dollars, but also in damaged and lost lives. We must end this madness now. Too many people are being thrown away for the crime of being ill.

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Here is the note left for us all, I think, but especially for Shannon's family, by Jasper Rushing's loved one last night:

I am one of the"murderers" family members. I was there at his birth, through his childhood and up through his young adulthood. He is a struggling mentally ill person fighting to survive as well. He was a beautiful baby with an inquisitive, intelligent mind. He grew to be a troubled child with many issues that his family attempted to deal with. As a young adult he seemed like the average boy/man. He was loving and kind through out his first 20 years. I'm not sure to this day what changed...

I love Jasper and always will, but I don't know who this man is. I know he's been begging for months to be taken out of general population because he just didn't feel safe himself. I am sorry to the family of Shannon, I am horrified and ashamed...your family is in my prayers along with our family who is at a loss as to where our beautiful boy went...

September 16, 2010 6:41 PM

Shannon Palmer's murder: prisoners at risk.

(Click here for 9/15/10 update)

This in from Phoenix's KPHO Channel 5 this morning, telling us that Shannon Palmer was castrated by his cellmate. I was kind of annoyed last week that the AZ Department of Corrections felt it necessary to notate that Palmer was in prison for the fourth time, since it seemed to have nothing to do with the fact he was murdered. Now I realize why they may have wanted to make him look like a more dangerous criminal than he was - he was being housed with a REAL serious criminal, which they're responsible for doing. Turning around and telling us all how many times the victim has been to prison before was just a way to make us care less about what happened to him, once the truth came out. That's pretty despicable, frankly.

What the ADC didn't tell us is that when Palmer was charged with criminal damage this last time, his mental capacity was in question enough that the judge ordered a competency exam twice under Rule 11 before allowing him to plead guilty, and again before sentencing him. The first time he was found to be not competent and had to be medicated to be deemed competent. All of that tells me he had a psychiatric disability. If fact, early on in the legal proceedings against him Palmer couldn't make it to the court hearings because he was in a "mental health setting".

Palmer's cellmate, on the other hand, was an apparent sociopath in for FIRST-degree murder and kidnapping, among other things, and had a history of violent behavior while in prison. Some of Palmer's prior court records are sealed because of his mental illness, but he apparently had no violent misconduct charges on his prison record.

I did some reading up on the ADC's policies about custody levels and housing recently because I've been investigating all these murders in the prisons of late, and was disturbed to see how easy they've made it for violent offenders to have access to people who can be easily victimized - presumably they did that to cut costs by cramming as many guys into a cell or dorm area as possible. It appears to have begun under Stewart or Schriro - the latter is the one who initially authorized putting medium -custody murderers in Kingman to begin with, not Ryan (though before the escapes happened, Ryan seemed to take pride in the ADC risk assessment instrument he helped develop that put those guys there).

Another interesting thing about this cellmate match-up is that both of the guys were just moved last month, after the escapes, to the Transitory Unit at Lewis. If there are any insiders out there who can fill me in on this unit, please do. According to the ADC daily count sheet for 9/8/10, that particular unit is very small and is ranked as a minimum custody unit (much of the rest of Lewis is close custody or protective segregation). Like the murderers who escaped from Kingman this summer, Palmer's deadly cellmate was listed as only a 3/3 internal/external security risk. Palmer was a 2/2. My bet is that they were part of the shuffle to appease the public's sense of security, but no one took into account the safety of the prisoners. Just looking at their records would tell you that these two guys weren't at all "similarly situated" in such a way that would justify putting Palmer in with Rushing, even temporarily.

My bet is that an insurance risk assessor determined that the state would save more money by bunking first-degree killers and mentally ill vandals together than they would lose from lawsuits if a prisoner was murdered - especially if they put people with no voice or family to care about them in with the real bad guys. Besides, how often does the public object to prisoners being murdered here? Unless it was another prisoner that did the killing, we won't even prosecute them, apparently. I hope Palmer has family that will sue the state for everything that Marcia Powell's mother wouldn't for housing him with Rushing. I'm sorry that won't bring him back home to them, though. The poor guy was almost done with his sentence when he was killed.

Please register your dismay about Palmer's murder wherever you see the news on it pop up, so the state gets the message that it's NOT okay to put vulnerable people at risk this way. This is especially disturbing because I recently received a letter from another prisoner with a mental illness who's terrified that he's being moved to a unit where he'll be murdered, too - it came Saturday, and was written before Palmer was killed. "Manuel", who has no family to fight for him, says it's the gangs doing all this killing - and he's not the only prisoner to write to me for help about their housing or custody arrangements out of fear of being set up for a gang hit or otherwise victimized. Apparently the killers and gangs have more control over the prisons than Director Ryan and his people do these days.

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Source: Dead Prison Inmate was Castrated.

BUCKEYE, Ariz. -- CBS 5 News has learned that an Arizona prison inmate who was found dead on Friday was castrated by his cell mate. Shannon Palmer died from his injuries Friday at Lewis Prison in Buckeye, according to prison officials, who would neither confirm nor deny that he was castrated.

His cell mate, convicted murderer Jasper Rushing, is believed to have castrated Palmer, someone with knowledge of the incident told CBS 5 News. Palmer was serving a three-year sentence for criminal damage out of Maricopa County. It was the fourth time Palmer was in prison, according to a Department of Corrections spokesman. The spokesman said that an investigation is ongoing