The United Nations has been asked to investigate the use of restraints on an intellectually disabled Aboriginal man 17 times in the past four years.
Malcolm Morton, 25, was found unfit to plead to a murder charge in 2012 over the stabbing death of his uncle when he was a teenager and has been held in Alice Springs Correctional Centre’s maximum security wing since.
His legal guardian, Patrick McGee, says Morton has been restrained in a chair 17 times since 2012 and has appealed for the the UN to intervene, the ABC reports.
“Because he spends large amounts of time in his cell, he can often get frustrated or angry or bored, and so he will bang his head against the cell bars or the cell walls, and he will do so quite violently and for long periods of time,” McGee said.
“And because he has an intellectual disability and this is a maximum security prison, often many of the prison officers don’t have the necessary set of skills to actually manage him and they strap him into a restraint chair and then they usually inject him with some type of tranquiliser until he’s compliant and calm.”
McGee said the use of the restraint chair was barbaric and had no positive outcomes. An official complaint has been made to the UN human rights council.
The president of Australia’s human rights commission, Gillian Triggs, has criticised the use of the restraint chair as well as the practice of holding a person with a disability in a maximum security prison.
She said she has had about 10 complaints similar to Morton’s in the past three years.
“They should be in a facility designed for people with intellectual disabilities, where the medical staff are fully trained to understand what restraint is humane, what is necessary and what is in the best interests of that patient,” she said.
The complaint comes after wide condemnation over using spit hoods and restraint chairs in the Don Dale juvenile detention centre in the Northern Territory, with the case of Dylan Voller highlighted by ABC’s Four Corners program last month.
A spokesman for the attorney general, George Brandis, said the use of restraint chairs had been suspended before the royal commission and it was a matter for the NT government.
