An inmate who was found dead in his cell over the weekend was a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought against the county alleging that jail staff tortured him and other inmates in 2019 by making them listen to the children’s song Baby Shark for hours on end.
Authorities at the Oklahoma County Detention Center claim that 48-year-old John Basco was found unconscious in his cell early on Sunday.
Correctional staff allegedly initiated life-saving efforts before declaring him dead.
Basco’s passing marks the 14th death at the facility this year, which has received criticism for escapes, deaths among inmates, and other problems.
No blatant signs of wrongdoing, according to prison spokesman Mark Opgrande, and police will investigate into the possibility of a drug overdose.
The State Medical Examiner’s Office will determine the cause of death.
Basco was one of a group of prisoners who filed a federal complaint against the county for allegedly being chained to a wall and had to listen to the song Baby Shark on repeat for hours at several events in 2019. Basco was hauled into the jail on a drug trafficking charge on Thursday.
Three people are facing misdemeanour charges in relation to the incidents, including a jail lieutenant who resigned and two detention officers who were fired.
Cameron Spradling, Basco’s attorney, told The Oklahoman that all evidence should be maintained while the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation conducts its investigation since the circumstances surrounding Basco’s death were “disturbing.”
This really worries me, Spradling remarked. Unexpectedly, one of the Baby Shark victims passed just three days after getting to the jail. Why does this happen? David Prater, the district attorney, just lost one of his potential witnesses in a criminal case. For me, this one doesn’t smell right.
According to Oklahoma prison records, Basco has a long history of criminal convictions in Oklahoma County dating back to the mid-1990s, mostly for drug, property, and weapons-related offences.
Documents show that he received a ten-year prison term for second-degree murder in 2000 and was freed in 2007.
In the Baby Shark lawsuit, Daniel Hendrick, Joseph Mitchell, and John Basco alleged that they were taken from their cells at the Oklahoma County Detention Center by two officers, placed in a “standing stress position” with their arms cuffed behind their backs, and then made to endure hours of continuous listening to the well-known children’s song.
The two cops involved, Christian Charles Miles and Gregory Cornell Butler Jr., were characterised as “wanton, evil, and vicious” in the lawsuit, which called their actions “tantamount to torture.”
In order to discredit the will of Iraqi prisoners, it compared the behaviour to heavy metal music played at Guantanamo Bay as part of a “enhanced interrogation” strategy. It also cited academic research to explain why the Baby Shark song by Pinkfong, which became popular in 2019, is particularly repulsive.
In the complaint, attorneys for the detainees who have since been freed claimed that during the time they were made to listen to the music in November and December 2019, they ‘presented no danger to the police or anyone else,’ were ‘cooperative,’ and ‘were not aggressively defying any legal instruction.’
According to the lawyers, the “prolonged restraint… is akin to torture under the conditions described below, was excessive, and had no justifiable relation to any legitimate governmental or penological goal.
The lawsuit goes on to say that despite management at the jail being aware of this history of abuse, “no action was done to stop the behaviour, and no reasonable protections were adopted to limit the potential of injury to prisoners like Plaintiffs.”
However, no one from Oklahoma County, the sheriff’s office, or the criminal justice authorities stepped forward to take remedial action despite the fact that these acts were “open, obvious, and repeated.”
This demonstrates a systemic and pervasive failure to educate and supervise in the most basic aspects of correctional operations and legal requirements for incarceration.
They said that by not taking action, they were “deliberately insensitive to citizens’ health and safety.”
Each former prisoner demanded $75,000 in retaliation.