Penobscot County Jail inmate on two-week hunger strike may be force-fed

BANGOR – Penobscot County officials are expected to seek a court order later this week to force-feed an inmate who has been on a two-week hunger strike at the Penobscot County Jail.

The inmate has gone without food for 15 days and has taken very little water, Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross said Tuesday, addressing the Penobscot County commissioners at their regular meeting.

Ross did not release the name of the inmate, citing medical privacy issues, but others have identified the inmate as James Emerson, 23, of Bangor, who is awaiting trial on burglary and theft charges.

Emerson, who has told Ross that he wants to be relocated to the Maine State Prison in Warren, has been in the county jail since April 27 after he was arrested in connection with a burglary in Corinth. The investigation led police to an apartment in Bangor where authorities reportedly found explosives and what appeared to be a methamphetamine laboratory.

While Penobscot County Jail inmates have gone on hunger strikes in the past, the inmates generally have given up a short time into it, Ross said.

“We’ve had them before, and they go for a little while and give up on it,” Ross told the commissioners. “This has gone longer than most.”

Ross said they have offered the inmate food every day and have tried to hospitalize the inmate in an effort to force-feed him.

Doctors at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where the inmate was taken, determined that he was neither psychotic nor medically compromised, Ross said, and therefore the hospital could not force-feed him without a court order.

Ross said the inmate has no apparent medical problems from the lack of food, and mental health and medical health staff are in constant contact with him.

“I talked to him yesterday,” Ross told the commissioners Tuesday. “You wouldn’t know anything was going on with him.”

Ross said a court order has been prepared and needs only to be signed by a judge, with Ross telling the commissioners that he will seek the court order by Friday at the latest.

The Penobscot County commissioners shared the sheriff’s concern, with Chairman Peter Baldacci telling Ross: “We don’t want to have a situation where there’s physical damage.”

At the first sign of medical problems, Ross said, the county will seek the court order, certainly before the weekend.

At the jail, the inmate is being housed in a holding cell where he is monitored and where food and water is offered to him. The cell also has a urinal, which some skeptical commissioners suggested the inmate might be using as a source of water.

With or without water, time is running short; it’s just a matter of degrees, Ross and others acknowledged.

Without food and water, it can take a few weeks or less for toxins in the body to build up and the body to break down, Dr. Erik Steele, chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems – the parent company of EMMC – said Tuesday.

Steele wasn’t familiar with the jail hunger strike situation, but he pointed to the highly publicized case of Terri Schiavo, who died 13 days after a court ordered her feeding tube removed.

The body can survive longer without food than without water, Steele said. How long a person survives depends on many factors, including the person’s health and any medical issues.

Ross has said that, as far as he knew, the inmate has had only two tastes of water in the past two weeks. With such minimal water intake, a body becomes dehydrated and the kidneys will begin to fail, leaving toxic metabolites in the system, slowly poisoning the body, Steele said.

“In a worst-case scenario, generally he has another week before he becomes seriously ill,” Steele said of someone who has gone with minimal to no water for two weeks.

Ross said that the inmate’s reasons for the strike have been confusing. In a letter he wrote to the sheriff, the inmate stated that he wanted to go to the Supermax prison and that he planned to hurt corrections officers to get there.

Placed in the holding cell, the inmate reportedly planned to harm himself, at which point anything he could use to harm himself was removed. He then began a hunger strike.

“Why he’s doing this, there’s mixed messages about it,” Ross said.