A jailhouse video shows deputies carrying a man, nearly lifeless, and loading him into the back of a patrol car in north Alabama. Hours later Tony Mitchell was pronounced dead at the hospital. Attorneys for his family say he died from hypothermia. They say the jail likely strapped Mitchell into a restraint chair and left him in a freezer or some other frigid environment for hours.

While back-and-forth legal motions argue over whether he was placed in a freezer, a second claim has gone largely undebated: that he was strapped to a restraint chair.

“That’s pretty common,” said Rick Singleton, former Lauderdale County Sheriff, of the use of restraint chairs. “If (inmates) really become disorderly, until they calm down. That’s not just for the mentally ill, but for any inmate that gets really out of control.”

Restraint chairs are a little-known tool employed by Alabama jailers and one tied to dozens of jail deaths in the United States. The United Nations Committee Against Torture two decades ago urged the United States to abolish the chairs. Yet they are still used in jails in many states.

“They are just completely inhumane. They are degrading. It’s the kind of treatment reserved for animals,” said Wanda Bertram with Prison Policy, a non-profit based in Washington state. She they are becoming less common across the country because of the controversies.

Sheriff Jay Jones, outgoing president of the Alabama Sheriff’s Association, said he believes that they are necessary in extreme cases.

“What if (inmates) start bashing their head into the wall? Bashing their head into the bars? Getting a running start into the wall,” said Jones. “That might be an example of when we use a restraint chair.”

He said that his jail in Lee County in east Alabama has a restraint chair, but uses it rarely, only when inmates are extremely violent and a threat to officers or themselves.

Lawyers for the Walker County Sheriff’s Office dispute that Mitchell was kept in a freezer, calling it an outright lie, however their legal reply spends no time on the claims that Mitchell died after being held in a restraint chair. An attorney for the sheriffs department this week told AL.com they have seen no evidence that a restraint chair was used.

Multiple lawsuits in the United States have alleged time in restraint chairs has caused blood clots, especially when people are left in them for a long time. In rare instances, restraint chairs can lead to death by suffocation, according to some research studies. And the chairs are linked to past controversial cases in Alabama.

In May of 2021, Jeremy Lee Thompson, 34, of Geneva County died after having a heart attack when he was on methamphetamine. Instead of being taken to get medical help, police brought Thompson to the Geneva County Jail where he was placed in a restraint chair, a lawsuit alleges.

Thompson was sitting in his Honda Accord in the parking lot of a Dollar General clutching his chest, so other customers called 911. Instead of getting him medical help, the suit contends, responding officers took him to jail where he was placed in a restraint chair for an hour and a half.

“He had begun to shake and sweat profusely, as his emergency medical state became more dire,” the complaint states.

Thompson was given a dose of Ketamine and taken to the emergency room where he was diagnosed with a heart attack. Doctors tried to resuscitate him, but he did not survive.

In Alabama, sheriffs set their own policies around the use of restraint chairs. AL.com requested policies for use of restraint chairs from Walker and Geneva Counties but the counties did not immediately share their policies.

Sheriff Jones said Lee County has a strict policy for use of the chair that requires notification of medical and mental health officers any time the chair is used. He said the chair cannot be used for more than two hours at a time and no more than 8 hours in total, and the straps must be loose to certain standards.

The American Bar Association has published a set of standards for use of restraint chairs. Other organizations have called for its use to be banned, including Amnesty international, which has been outspoken against use of the chair since the early 2000′s.

But the ways the chairs are used deviates widely in practice.

Anyl Pascal was cuffed to a restraint chair, naked, in a hallway, in a Brookside jail just north of Birmingham in 2021, with men and women walking by. “Completely naked. No underwear, no socks, no blanket, just a mattress and myself,” he told AL.com last year.

Pascal had been pulled over by police and charged with speeding, possession of a small amount of marijuana and later disorderly conduct for kicking a jail door. A judge later dismissed Pascal’s charges on appeal after reporting by AL.com drew attention to a pattern of police misconduct in Brookside. The experience has left him anxious to leave the house.

“I’m kinda nervous all the time, man,” he said. “You know, I look unapproachable, but it’s really because I’m stressed and full of anxiety.

Some states monitor usage of restraint chairs, like Pennsylvania, which also reports the use of restraint chairs on pregnant women. Alabama does not, said Sheriff Jones. It can be difficult to get public information about what occurs in jails until something goes wrong.

In an incident that made news in Conecuh County in south Alabama, Crystal Coleman, then 33, said she was tased while in a restraint chair in 2011 after she was arrested, intoxicated, for domestic violence.

“It is nothing unusual for an inmate to be tased,” said then Sheriff Edwin Booker, “I’m not sure it happened while she was restrained. I believe it happened while they were trying to buckle her into restraints, and she was kicking.”

In Madison County in north Alabama, a mentally ill man was hospitalized after being beaten by guards while restrained in a chair in 2015. That incident resulted in news reports, an FBI investigation and a lawsuit that was settled against the jail in 2019.

Restraint chairs have contributed to inmate deaths and controversy in other states in recent years.

In Missouri, a man sued in 2019 after being strapped in a restraint chair for five days in Wayne County. And a former Georgia sheriff from Clayton County, Victor Hill, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Tuesday after he was found guilty of six charges involving denying inmates’ constitutional rights by leaving them in restraint chairs for hours as a punishment.

In Ohio, a jail supervisor was sentenced to time in prison after a security video showed he punched and pepper sprayed a female inmate who was strapped in a restraint chair in 2018.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who focuses on prisons, said that many jails use restraint chairs out of habit. He said that soft restraints, like padded handcuffs, would be less painful and less likely to cause people to hyperventilate or have an anxiety attack.

“It’s almost like they are restrained too completely, so they become passive, and then it looks like they are under control when in fact they may be suffering or they may be at medical risk,” he said of the chairs.

He said anyone put in a restraint chair should be monitored by a medical professional and checked for medical conditions that would make the chair dangerous to them. He said it is important to assess what underlying conditions might be causing them to act out.

In Georgia, a college student died after he was placed in a restraint chair following his arrest during a bipolar episode in 2015. Nine deputies in Chatham County were fired after an investigation into the death of Matthew Ajibade, 22, who was tased while he was restrained in the chair.

After his death, the county clarified its policies against using tasing inmates in restraint chairs in a memo. “Less than lethal force may only be used to gain control over a non-compliant and/or aggressive subject and is never applied maliciously or as punishment.”