From [HERE] A video that shows a bound, naked Black man — his head covered with an irritant-soaked mask — being struck and held down until he stops breathing should be released because it is a public document, a lawyer says in a new legal document. 

The recording shows what led to the March 25, 2018 death of J’Allen Jones, 31, an inmate at the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown. Lynnette Richardson, Jones’ girlfriend and administrator of his estate, and his mother, Jessica Jones, filed the wrongful death lawsuit against state Department of Correction staff members five months after he died.

The state is defending the staff, justifying the use of force and saying the correction officers didn’t know about Jones’ medical condition: An autopsy showed his cardiovascular disease was a factor to his death.

An internal investigation concluded that the correction officers did not use excessive force, although DOC Capt. Robert Hartnett, who conducted the investigation, did find that the eight officers and a DOC nurse waited too long to begin life-saving measures.

In the motion filed Friday to unseal the video, attorney Ron Murphy wrote that the Attorney General’s Office had submitted the recording as an exhibit, which it cited 37 times in legal documents. 

“Exhibit A must now be considered a judicial document immediately accessible to the public,” Murphy wrote.

The state has until Oct. 25 to file a response to Murphy's motion.

In his motion, Murphy explained how the approximately 50-minute video, recorded by a correction officer using a handheld camera, came to be sealed.

Lawyers from the state Attorney General’s Office “refused to disclose the video unless the plaintiff agreed to a discovery protective order, which plaintiff did under duress as it was the only way to get the video,” Murphy said in the motion.

He said the protective order, however, should not have applied to a video that is an exhibit.

Murphy also talked about why the state didn't want the video made public. Quoting Hartnett from a 2022 deposition, Murphy said the investigator “believes releasing the video would pose a safety and security concern to the Department of Corrections because the general public would be ‘inflamed’ and ‘incensed’ by the video showing J’Allen’s death."

The motion lists four specific images from the video that Hartnett allegedly said would upset the public:

1. Correction officers holding Jones down “when you can hear J’Allen having difficulty breathing”;

2. J’Allen “flopped over to the side” in a wheelchair while “unconscious”;

3. “The seven-minute delay before the onset of CPR” and 

4. “A period of inaction ... while Mr. Jones was undergoing a medical emergency.”

Murphy also pointed out a few areas Hartnett did not address, writing that "Jones was Black and eight of the nine defendants are white,” and that Jones didn't “hit or threatened any of the defendants involved in his death.”

“The events in the video are as disturbing as the events in the video of George Floyd’s death,” Murphy wrote, referring to Floyd's 2020 death after a police officer kneeled on his neck, an act that was captured on cellphone video, sparking nationwide protests and changes in how police do their jobs.

“But in some ways, the video of J’Allen’s death is worse as the defendants struck J’Allen repeatedly, violently threw him down twice, sprayed him twice directly in the face with pepper spray while his face was covered by a safety veil — all while J’Allen was naked, handcuffed behind his back, shackled at his ankles, hogtied, and having a schizophrenic episode in the psych ward of a Connecticut prison,” he wrote.

“Moreover, the defendants caused J’Allen to stop breathing, become unconscious, and then delayed calling 911 or starting CPR by seven minutes after it was apparent he had stopped breathing,” Murphy wrote.

Murphy also suggested that there was an attempt to deceive anyone watching the video. He quotes in the motion a lieutenant who at one point looked at the camera and then twice said in a low voice, “Clean this up." Murphy said in other court documents that he had to use audio-enhancing technology to amplify the words so he could hear them clearly.  

He wrote that the correction officers then nodded in agreement and “start shouting and hitting J’Allen as if to justify their prior actions.”

Hartnett’s investigation, which included an in-depth account of what the video shows about the officers’ use of force, states that the officers started warning Jones to stop resisting much earlier during the deadly interaction, however.