Florida Settles Lawsuit With Prison Guard Whistle Blowers

This is a report on what happened to three Florida Department of Corrections staff members after they testified under oath before a Florida State Senate committee about murdering, brutal, dishonest guards in Florida’s prisons.

Florida is the nation’s third largest prison system.  The Miami Herald began an investigative project into reports of alleged brutality and corruption in the prison system. Only then did prison officials begin to acknowledge the complaints.    In September 2014, I reported on the firing of 32 guards from the Florida Department of Corrections.

Randall Jordan Aparo

One of the correction officers that was terminated is Rollin Austin.  Records show that Austin ordered the gassing of Randall Jordan-Aparo, a 27-year-old check forger who died at Franklin Correctional in September 2010.

Randall Jordan-Aparo begged to be taken to the hospital for a blood disorder that had flared up. Instead, Austin ordered the gassing in close quarters cell. Three years after Randall Jordan-Aparo’s death, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement visited the Franklin prison to look into an unrelated wrongdoing and stumbled onto the circumstances behind Jordan-Aparo’s death. Florida Department of Law Enforcement inspectors now call what happened a case of “sadistic retaliatory” behavior by guards.

The cover-ups, corruption and other wrong-doing did not end in 2014.  On November 29, 2016,  Tampa Bay news reported that Florida agreed to settle a case for $800,000.  That case was filed by whistle blowers who alleged retaliation.

What Happens When the Miami-Dade Corrections Dept Doesn’t Think You Look Like A Woman

Fior Pichardo de Veloz

Fior Pichardo de Veloz is a lawyer.  She is also a local elected official in the Dominican Republic.   In November 2013, she flew into the Miami International Airport in Florida to witness the birth of her grandchild.  She was taken into custody on a federal, 1988 warrant for a drug charge in a case that she thought had been resolved.

That was two years ago, and on September 13, 2016, Fior filed a lawsuit in federal court; not because of the mix-up with the warrant, but because a nurse at the Miami-Dade jail assumed that Fior had been born male and had her placed in a general holding cell with 40 men.

According to her lawyers, Fior was initially placed into a jail cell as a woman, but a nurse alleged to evaluating her for exhibiting “non-traditional male characteristics.”  The nurse alleged that she determined Fior had male reproductive organs and she was then sent to Metro West Detention Center, a male-only facility.