The prison he was first sent to did actually have a separate tier for gay inmates, but according to Rodney, because he did not "appear overly effeminate" during his classification, he was placed with the general population and because it was supposedly rare to have a gay person slip through the cracks of the system, his fellow inmates took full advantage. Within days of his first entering prison, the 23-year-old Rodney claimed he was the victim of three separate sexual assaults, involving five different inmates. His account suggests that far from being a paradise, prison for gay men can be a living hell. He described a litany of brutal rapes, assaults, beatings and, eventually, the total abandonment of his male identity as his only means of survival in the hyper-masculine and often homophobic prison environment. One young man named Rodney, imprisoned for fraud and check-forging, sent me a detailed account of his life so far in prison. The reality of life in prison for homosexuals and transgender individuals does not appear to reflect this myth. His death sentence was later overturned (mostly because Burdine's public defender had slept through much of his trial), but the homophobic thinking – that prison is some kind of paradise for gay men – lingers on. After 17 minutes of deliberation, the jury obliged and sentenced Burdine to die. “All this is connected to the slavery past in Brazil where Blacks were whipped night and day,” Adami told The Guardian.I n 1984, when Calvin Burdine was awaiting sentencing for allegedly stabbing his gay lover to death, the prosecuting attorney encouraged the jury in his closing remarks to award Burdine the death penalty, rather than life in prison, on the grounds that sending a gay man to prison was akin to sending a kid to a candy store. But it was filmed,” Humberto Adami, a Black lawyer from Rio de Janeiro, told the newspaper.Īdami, who’s also president of the Brazilian bar association’s Black Slavery Truth Commission, said the fact the guards filmed “the torture” showed they were sure they would not get caught. “We will give all the support needed.”įor some Black Brazilians, the video shows how deeply rooted racism is in Brazil, where more than half of the population identifies as Black or of mixed race, The Guardian reported.
“We were shocked by the gratuitous and meaningless torture on a teenage victim,” the company said in the statement. The supermarket said in a statement to the media that the supermarket no longer contracts with the company that employs the guards. He said it was the third time the same guards assaulted him allegedly for stealing from the supermarket and that he’d been living on the streets since he was 12 years old, Folha de S.Paulo reported. “They said if I spoke to anyone, they would kill me,” he told the news source. The boy told TV Globo the guards threatened him if he spoke up about the incident. He added that the crime of torture carries a prison sentence of up to eight years. “They tied him up and whipped him until he promised to not do it again,” de Souza told The Guardian. The boy told de Souza the guards stopped him as he was leaving the supermarket.
He started looking into the incident, interviewed the victim and identified the two security guards, he told the British newspaper. He described the victim as “a defenseless, homeless black man … A victim of society, I would say.”ĭe Souza told The Guardian he was “extremely shocked” when a journalist sent him the video on Monday regarding the alleged theft at a Ricoy supermarket. “It is like a scene from centuries ago,” detective Pedro Luis de Souza told The Guardian. He shook his head, unable to speak because he was gagged. Two security guards who were contracted by a Ricoy supermarket in Brazil are accused of whipping a teen while naked for allegedly stealing chocolate. “Are you going to come back?” someone can be heard asking the child in the 40-second video. The unidentified 17-year-old boy’s trousers were around his ankles when the footage showed him being beaten with an electric cable inside a private jail in São Paulo, according to the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Cellphone video of a Black boy naked and whimpering while being whipped in Brazil allegedly for stealing four chocolate bars is dredging up a painful history in the country for Black Brazilians.