The State - News from July 18, 1988

An Orange County Jail inmate has filed a class-action lawsuit against county officials in an attempt to stop sheriff’s deputies from routinely shackling sick or dying inmates to their beds while they are in locked, guarded rooms in hospital wards. The suit claims the shackling policy violates state and federal laws, as well as constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The suit was filed in Orange County Superior Court by a representative of inmate Thomas Maniscalco, a lawyer who has been in jail for more than four years awaiting trial in connection with a triple murder. Maniscalco has complained to jail officials about the shackling policy since May, when a 41-year-old inmate who was comatose and in the last stages of liver cancer died shackled to a bed in the jail ward.