Gwinnett Daily Post | Class action suit challenging ‘restraint chair’ use at jail

Ryan Anisko is pantomiming. Poorly, but he gets the message across. He wants a pen.

It’s Feb. 18. He’s in a cell at the Gwinnett County jail after being picked up on DUI charges.

The camera’s already rolling, meaning the chair is coming, but Anisko doesn’t know that. After a few minutes he grows agitated: He flips off the sheriff’s deputy, says he’s going to sue “the s—-” out of everybody and sits down in the cell. He’s out of the camera’s sight when someone shouts through the glass to lay on the ground.

Shortly, four members of the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Department’s Rapid Response Team, the “RRT,” are in the cell. Wearing heavy-duty gear — helmets, masks, vests — they pounce, pinning Anisko down. His left leg is bent up and sat on. He says he’s sorry and asks what he did wrong.

After a fifth deputy brings in the chair, Anisko’s thrown in.

For three hours and 40 minutes, his arms and legs are locked in position and he’s pushed into the corner of a cell.

Restraint chairs are, for the most part, exactly what they sound like.

Intimidating devices with confining arm and leg straps alongside shoulder and lap belts, they’re used just about every day at the Gwinnett County jail. Protocol calls for them to be implemented to “restrain or limit the movement of (inmates) who … create a danger to themselves and/or others.” Complex phrases like “immediate and compelling intent to commit property damage and/or physical harm to themselves and/or others” are key.

A class action lawsuit filed against Sheriff Butch Conway and two other jail officials, though, is challenging the use of restraint chairs. Represented by attorneys John Cicala and Craig Jones, an undisclosed number of former inmates (which includes Anisko) is calling them excessive and unconstitutional.

“It’s overkill,” Jones said. “It’s gratuitous, it’s unnecessary, it’s punitive. It’s retaliatory in a lot of cases.”

It’s also complicated — and on video.

In the first half of this year, 129 Gwinnett County inmates were placed in the restraint chair. The justifications vary, but, according to documents obtained via the Open Records Act, typically fall under the fear of forthcoming self-harm.

“Inmate Anisko was placed into the restraint chair due to self harming behavior by striking the cell door with his head, hands and feet hard enough to cause harm to himself,” the official report says in reference to Anisko’s encounter.