The Torture-Murder of Othel Moore Jr. and Missouri’s Concentration Camp Prisons

Four Missouri prison cops were charged Friday with murder, and a fifth with involuntary manslaughter, in the December execution of Othel Moore Jr., a 38-year-old brother at Jefferson City Correctional Center. The prison cops restrained Othel with a full-body torture contraption, covered him with a hood and a mask, and repeatedly attacked him with chemical weapons. Witnesses reported Moore pleading for his life. “I never watched anybody die before,” Jordan Seller, a former prisoner at the facility who was an eyewitness to Moore’s murder told CNN. The nightmarish horror began with what was supposed to be a routine cell search on the maximum-security block. “They come in like a hundred deep, and that’s barely an exaggeration,” Seller recounted. “They try to pull everybody out as fast as they can, search the cells as fast as they can, and get out.” Seller and his cellmate had already been pulled out and put back in their cell when they saw the commotion around Moore’s cell. “The cell was surrounded by COs,” he said. Moore was begging for his life, saying he had a medical lay-in and needed two pairs of handcuffs to ease the tension on his shoulders.An attorney for Moore’s family,...