Daniel Chongwas awarded $4 million after he was detained, told he wouldn’t be charged, and then left in a windowless cell in the DEA’s San Diego headquarter without food or water for four days. He drank his urine to stay alive and after being found spent three days in the ICU.
Hey, mistakes happen. The DEA regrets the error.
This again proves that the "war on drugs" is a crime against humanity. Though I have read elsewhere, that he got "only" 3 million USD, Mr. Chong deserves this compensation.(BTW if we apply this principle to all wrongly imprisoned people in the US, some prisoners at Gitmo are virtually billionaires.)
Sadly, if history repeats itself, the agents and officers will probably get promoted. Some drug warriors, perverse as they can be, probably see this as some sort of scared straight program for pot heads. So it goes in law enforcement these days.
I wonder if we'd see any improvement if the monetary rewards were, at least in part, coming out of the pockets of the officers/agents responsible for these "mistakes." The privilege of qualified immunity only feeds the sense of entitlement among LEO's today.
Dave- IL