by Anthony W. Accurso

Spit hoods are a type of restraint used by prison and jail guards, as well as other law enforcement and custodial healthcare professionals, ostensibly to protect themselves from the bites and spit of detainees. The instructions are simple: place the hood over a detainee’s head to prevent them from spitting or biting, thus protecting the guard or law enforcement officer from contracting a disease born by bodily fluids.

The reality is that is it exceedingly rare for guards or cops to contract a disease this way, while at least 31 detainees have died in the last decade after being placed in a spit hood. Aside from their potential lethality, spit hoods are needlessly humiliating and distressing for detainees. Worse, their use is rooted in racist violence from United States history.

A Notorious Example

On March 22, 2020, while visiting his brother in Rochester, New York, Daniel Prude, 41, experienced an acute mental health crisis. He was briefly hospitalized and released back to his brother’s home. The next day, Prude ran out of the house into freezing temperatures without a coat or shoes on. His brother called 911, and “Rochester police officers were dispatched to find Prude and transport him to a hospital for a mental hygiene detention,” according to the complaint later filed on his behalf. The police located him naked in the street, unarmed but “in a confused and scared state.”

Detaining Prude there, cops ordered him to lie down on the pavement to be handcuffed, and he complied. But when they moved to place a spit hood over Prude’s head, it “caused him to become alarmed.” He struggled, and “three officers forced him to the ground, and then pinned his head and chest down.”

Shortly after that, he lost consciousness and went into cardiac arrest. Police summoned paramedics, who performed CPR for approximately 17 minutes. They “also administered Epinephrine and Sodium Bicarbonate,” before they eventually intubated him.

After his heart began beating again, Prude was taken to a hospital, where it was determined that his brain “had been deprived of oxygen for approximately 20 minutes, leaving him in a vegetative state.” Seven days later, when they were told nothing further could be done for him, Prude’s family decided to remove him from life support.

Prude was survived by five children, including his eldest son, Nathaniel McFarland. On behalf of his dad’s estate, he filed suit in federal court for the Western District of New York, accusing Rochester cops of unconstitutional use of force that caused Prude’s death. The complaint noted that “the medical examiner’s report concluded the death was a homicide, caused by ‘complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.’”

The parties negotiated a $12 million pretrial settlement in October 2022, paid by the City of Rochester on behalf of itself and all other Defendants. The largest civil rights settlement in city history, according to Mayor Malik Evans (D), the payout included costs and fees for Plaintiff’s attorneys with Faraci Lange, LLP in Rochester, Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. in Chicago and Adam David Ingber, P.C., also in Chicago. See: MacFarland v. City of Rochester, USDC (W.D.N.Y.), Case No. 6:20-­cv-­06675.

The killing also contained the elements of most cases where use of a spit hood preceded death. Police or detention guards seek to restrain a person—often a person of color, someone experiencing a mental health crisis, or both, as Prude was—and as part of this process, they deploy a spit hood, usually in conjunction with other forms of restraint. The detainee struggles to breathe, eventually losing consciousness; he is then pronounced dead shortly afterwards. In many cases, aggrieved family members who had sought emergency care for their loved one sue for excessive force, costing local taxpayers money that could have been spent instead on preventative mental health care or some equally beneficial social service.

This pattern raises important questions: If spit hoods can cause death, especially when used with other restraints, why employ them? What safeguards are in place to prevent such a potentially deadly device from being used in a manner likely to result in death? And what is there to prevent this pattern from playing out over and over again?

COVID-19 and Before

COVID-­19 had arrived in Rochester just before officers were called to help Daniel Prude, a time of fear for many first responders during those early days of the pandemic were. Body-­cam videos of Prude’s incident revealed that he told officers he was infected with the coronavirus, which likely raised concerns about his saliva, especially since much was not then known about how the virus was transmitted.

Before he was hooded, Prude could be seen “spit[ting] in front of himself as he’s laying [sic] on his stomach,” his estate’s complaint recalled. “And once or twice, with his head turned, he spits farther away between two officers, seemingly to avoid hitting them.”

Anyone who experienced the upper-­respiratory symptoms of COVID-­19 knows that excess mucus production contributed to Prude’s desire to spit on the ground while he was detained. But this action likely alarmed the officers, who had been trained to deploy a spit hood when detainees are spitting.

Spit hoods, a.k.a. spit socks or spit masks, are a type of fine mesh bag designed to be placed over the head of a non-­compliant detainee to limit contact between a his bodily fluids and a guard, officer or medic. This can also inhibit the detainee’s ability to assault an officer by biting. The hoods often have features like an elastic band to secure the hood from coming off the detainee’s head; a hole below the chin to provide aid his breathing; and a semi-­transparent space so officers can observe the detainee’s face.

“It wouldn’t put any pressure on the carotid arteries in the neck. It wouldn’t restrict blood flow to the brain and certainly wouldn’t block the mouth or nose,” said Police Chief Wade Carpenter of Park City, Utah, adding that cops in the ski town “have used the devices for years without issues.”

Videos on the internet advertise the effectiveness of some spit hoods, showing various “detainee” actors attempting to spit saliva, oils or other liquids, and how the hoods inhibit their ability to do so.

They look like “something out of Abu Ghraib,” said Adanté Pointer, an Oakland, California, civil rights lawyer, referencing the notorious Iraq prison that was the scene of a U.S. military scandal involving mistreatment of detainees. Pointer, who has been involved in several legal cases where spit hoods were used, also noted, “[t]hey’re often used in a punitive way.”

Though spit hoods have been around for decades, they have become especially popular since COVID-­19, and their use is widespread in detention settings. Just prior to the pandemic, the United Kingdom’s Scotland Yard announced it would supply its officers with spit hoods. In contrast, the New York Police Department does not give spit hoods to patrol officers, though for a time it began “issuing them to emergency service officers, who are also trained as medics, on a trial basis,” according to spokesman Al Baker.

When Two Isn’t Better Than One

Tim Peters was a 49-­year-­old handyman living with his wife Julie in the Tampa exurbs, when sheriff’s deputies were called in April 2022 because he “started banging on a neighbor’s door and shouting about religion, just before sunrise with a beer bottle in his hand.” Neither his wife nor deputies were able to calm him down, and he was transported to the “medical unit” at the Hernando County Jail (HCJ).

Julie Peters later said that she didn’t know what led to her husband’s behavior that morning, though she believed he may have been suffering from a “psychological breakdown.” Though he had never been diagnosed with mental illness. When a call came to confirm that he had made it to the jail, she was happy.

“Oh, thank God,” she recalled thinking. “He’s safe.”

Yet two days later, he was dead.

The Hernando County Sheriff’s Office initially refused to release details about the death. But reporters from WTSP in Tampa pressed for details and eventually obtained uncensored video of Tim Peters in custody at HCJ. That footage showed him struggling with guards before they eventually pepper sprayed and restrained him, covering his head with not one but two spit hoods—the second added after the first became soaked with his saliva and blood.

Moments later he went motionless. Guards noticed that Peters was non-­responsive and attempted to resuscitate him—without removing either spit hood from his head. Hernando County Spokesperson Denise Moloney said that both hoods were left on Peters when guards started CPR “because their immediate priority was to revive him.”

“We did everything in our power to help him,” Moloney said. “We don’t believe the spit hood was the source of issues he had.”

“What I was originally told was that they were going to move him,” Julie Peters said, because he had become “agitated and they were going to move him from the cell that they had him into a more comfortable cell for, I guess, someone that was going through a mental health episode, agitated, very agitated.” When she finally saw the video of what actually happened, the young widow said, “I just couldn’t believe it. I was just so angry, so angry and just, just so mad.”

Peters found Ohio attorney Thomas D. Robenalt, who successfully sued Clay County over the death of mentally ill detainee Daniel Lisinbigler, Jr., 19, at the county jail in March 2013. Lisinbigler had been arrested for exposure of sexual organs after running naked down the hall of a motel outside Jacksonville, shouting that he could save everyone because he was God. At the jail, he allegedly became unruly and was pepper-­sprayed before he was placed in restraints and a spit hood. The coroner ruled his death a homicide, but the district attorney refused to file charges against any guards involved. The city and county of Jacksonville reportedly settled a suit that his family filed in November 2014 for $2.2 million.

Robenalt filed a suit for Julie Peters in federal court for the Middle District of Florida on April 11, 2024, accusing Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis and his jailers of violating her husband’s civil rights with excessive use of force in deploying the spit hood that suffocated him and then showing deliberate indifference to his resulting serious medical need. In addition to Robenalt, Plaintiff is represented by Tampa attorney Andrew Wozniak of Greco Wozniak PA. See: Peters v. Nienhuis, USDC (M.D. Fla.), Case No. 8:24-­cv-­00893.

Policy and Training

There are currently no national policies regarding the use of spit hoods. While some jurisdictions may provide limits or have banned them altogether, thousands of police departments, sheriff’s offices, prisons and jails are left to determine best practices for their use.

Original reporting from The Marshall Project and WTSP reviewed policies from 100 departments in 25 states, finding that “only 10 of those departments restrict spit hoods to cases in which someone is actively spitting or biting others, or is about to do so.” In only 11 departments are detainees warned before they are put in a spit mask. Only 12 policies bother to point out “that people in a mental health crisis can experience high distress when in a spit net.” Almost all spit hood policies require removing them “when a person is vomiting, bleeding from the mouth or suffering from other medical conditions.”

But a study from the United Kingdom revealed that, in at least one jurisdiction just outside London, spit hoods have been used as a “preventative measure” since the onset of the COVID-­19 pandemic. Explained one Thames Valley officer, if detainees “refuse to wear a mask whilst being transported, they will be put in a spit hood.”

According to USA Today, “[m]ost makers of spit hoods devices say they sell them with clear instructions, noting that the manufacturers cannot be held liable for any injuries if the bags are used improperly.” These instructions often state that the hoods should not be left on a detainee “for more than several minutes at a time, and never leave the person unattended.” They also warn against using the devices on people “who are bleeding heavily from the mouth or are vomiting, or who appear to be in a mental health crisis.”

Among the many U.S. prisons, jails and law enforcement agencies which stock spit hoods as part of their tool kit, the lack of policies and training is alarming. Most consumers aren’t expected to read the “instruction manual” for products they purchase, but a potentially deadly product can be used by police officers with little or no training—even if that means that they are not apprised of the possible dangers.

John Cominsky was the inventor of the Tranzport Hood, made and distributed by TranZport Products. “Anything can be misused,” said Cominsky. But he insisted that the Tranzport Hood is “safe for the officers and the person in it when used properly.” He added that the company urges agencies to provided training in use of the hood. But then he also told The Marshall Projeect that “the only instructions” needed for his product “are the ones he provides.”

A Hood of Another Color

One Saturday evening in June 2004, police in Mequon, Wisconsin, were called about a vehicle that had driven off without paying for about $10 worth of gas. Officers located Matthew Sheridan, 20, in a vehicle matching the gas station’s description of the thief. A crack pipe was observed in the vehicle, and Sheridan was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia.

Officer Gregory Klobukowski cuffed Sheridan behind his back and placed him in the rear of his squad car for transport. But the detainee was then able to get his hands in front of him and “was kicking around in the back of the vehicle,” Klobukowski later reported. He stopped his vehicle and summoned backup to the scene; some who responded were from nearby police departments. Sheridan was taken from Klobukowski’s vehicle and placed face down in the grass with his arms behind him, an officer’s knee in his back. He was placed in leg restraints. Sheridan was reportedly yelling, kicking and spitting as officers stood him up, grass in his mouth. Some of that was allegedly spit on an officer, and so Klobukowski then took a mask still sealed in a foil packet and opened it without reading its warnings about improper use before he placed it on the detainee.

The mask deployed on Matthew was not a spit hood, though those were available to Mequon officers, but rather a “chem/biohazard” mask, which Mequon Police had acquired in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It had a respirator/mouthpiece, which was not placed in Matthew’s mouth. Though he began complaining about not being able to breathe, one officer reportedly responded, “If you can’t breathe, you can’t talk.” Sheridan was placed back in the rear of Klobukowski’s vehicle for the 8–to-­9-­minute ride to the station. On arrival he was found dead; some CPR was apparently attempted, without success. An autopsy later concluded that he suffocated to death.

Despite a number of “mild-­to-­moderate brushes with the law”—including an alleged bail violation, disorderly conduct and burglary—Sheridan was not “a seriously bad person” but merely one having “trouble adjusting into adulthood,” his parents said. The family filed suit, and the parties reportedly settled out of court for a total of $1.5 million—including $1.25 million paid by the City of Mequon, with the balance split between neighboring communities of Bayside, Fox Point and River Hills, whose officers assisted in subduing the doomed detainee.

Safety Concerns

As in many such cases, no criminal charges were filed with Sheridan’s death, and Defendants in his parents’ civil suit did not admit any wrongdoing. Indeed, court documents reflect that Officer Klobukowski made an “honest mistake,” though one that resulted in death. But that was partly to blame on the fact that Klobukowski failed to distinguish between a restraint hood and a bio/chem mask—something that wouldn’t happen if law enforcement took more seriously the risk of death arising from hooding and provided training accordingly.

Public statements by detention and law enforcement officials betray an underlying assumption that spit hoods are harmless and safe to use. Former DC Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee said that agency’s spit hood policy was predicated upon a belief that “[p]roper use (i.e. application, general wearing, and removal) of the spit hood is not, in and of itself, a use of force.”

“People quite frankly underestimate the level of danger that officers can face from individuals that are using their mouths and their teeth,” offered Maria Haberfield, a professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She also said that spit hoods are safe “[m]ost of the time”—“unless a person has an underlying condition.”

“A spit hood was placed on [the head of Tim Peters] to keep any projectile vomiting or spitting or anything like that from impacting the deputies,” insisted Hernando County Sheriff Nienhuis. “I think it’s important to know that these are not thick pieces of cloth. They are very, very sheer, and even if wet, they should allow air to pass through.”

Police departments frequently cite a particular study from 2023 which demonstrated that spit hoods sprayed with artificial saliva were easier to breathe through than an N95 mask. This study, Physiological Effects of a Spit Restraint Device Saturated With Artificial Saliva, noted the increasing use of spit hoods among law enforcement and sought “to evaluate whether a saturated spit restraint device has any clinically significant effects on the ventilatory or circulatory parameters of healthy adult subjects.”

Critics have argued that the “laboratory conditions’’ of the study failed to replicate real-­world factors. The study’s authors even noted in their conclusion that “[f]urther research is needed to test other ventilatory and circulatory parameters of spit socks with subjects in different positioning, alternative masks, during physical exertion, and the effects of thicker, more occlusive bodily fluids such as blood or emesis.”

Dr. Dan Woodard, a former emergency room physician, has been studying the effects of spit hoods ever since testifying in a 2018 case of a Florida detainee who died in custody under a spit restraint. Of such studies, he notes that these “are people who are in a controlled [laboratory] environment,” rather than detainees who have “just finished running from the police or getting punched or hit or thrown to the ground.”

The list of deaths in custody involving spit hoods, compiled by The Marshall Project and WTSP, noted that “in more than half” of the cases a spit hood was used “in conjunction with other restraint techniques or tactical weapons, including hog-­tying, pepper spray and stun guns.” One anecdotal case illustrates how even minor differences between the laboratory and real life can be drastically different.

Nzinga Bayano Amani was a civil rights activist in Knoxville, Tennessee who had multiple encounters with police prior to a city council meeting in 2022, when police barged in to serve them an arrest warrant. During the encounter, police placed a spit hood on Amani, but they “misplaced the elastic band of the spit hood that is supposed to go around the neck, and Amani struggled to breathe after the band was caught in their mouth.” Forced to take deep breaths through their nose to avoid losing consciousness, Amani said that “I knew if at any time I got any more stressed or agitated, there’s a possibility I could have passed out.”

Ray Bedard, who has studied the effects of stress on decision-­making in such encounters, said that, “[s]ociety, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a living laboratory.”

Degradation Is the Point

In May 2023, officers from South Carolina’s Bennettsville Police Department responded to a 911 call about “a man pulling bushes from multiple businesses.” Eldred Joe was homeless and not taking medication for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at the time. After some chasing, he was arrested and taken to the Marlboro County Detention Center but became “uncooperative” during booking. He was placed on his stomach, and his hands were shackled behind his back while guards inventoried his pockets. They then placed Joe in a detention cell.

That is when Joe’s real troubles began.

According to a suit later filed on Joe’s behalf, guard Morgan Ridges entered Joe’s cell and “first used his right foot to pin [Joe’s] head to the floor” before he “lift[ed] his left foot off the floor”—so that he was “standing on [Joe’s] head.” Ridges also “stomped and struck [Joe] in the head with his right foot, causing his head to strike the floor.” As PLN reported, the guard tried and mercifully failed to put Joe in a spit mask, punching him in the head with a closed fist for not cooperating. Joe was then left handcuffed in the cell for the next 12 hours before Bennettsville police returned the next day to transport Joe to a mental health evaluation, finding him rocking in the cell and yelling, “Lord help me!” atop floor tiles that they noticed “had been pulled up, broken, and scattered”—allegedly when Ridges assaulted the detainee. [See: PLN, Oct. 2024, p.36.]

“Eldred Joe’s only crime was that he was sick,” said his attorney, Bakari Sellers. “Officer Ridges didn’t beat him because he was violent or some kind of threat. He did it because he could and because he believed no one would care.”

The Horror of Hooding

Ridges brutalized an unarmed, restrained Black man, pausing mid-­torture to grab a spit mask and attempt to hood him. Why? According to Tasha Williams and Alison Kinney, writing for The New Republic, it is because “[t]he use of spit hoods and other hoods to torture and terrorize vulnerable people is a fact and feature of America’s history, as well as its present.”

“There is a long historical record of authorities,” wrote Williams and Kinney, “using hoods, masks, and other devices that cover people’s heads and mouths, to subdue, subjugate, and control, to cause humiliation and physical harm.” At its founding in the nineteenth century, Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania used isolation and solitary confinement—including hooding prisoners when they left their cells—because officials thought it was “edifying and humane.”

“Prisoners condemned to capital punishment have been forcibly hooded for at least three centuries,” and hoods have been “used as torture devices since at least 1902, when U.S. troops hooded and waterboarded Filipino insurgents during the Philippine-­American War,” the researchers noted.

Jewish prisoners were also hooded, beaten and shackled by Nazi guards at Fort Breendonk in Belgium during the Second World War. Indeed, it seems that in nearly every conflict where vulnerable people have been tortured since the beginning of the twentieth century, the victims have been hooded. It is therefore appalling, though not altogether shocking, to see hooding widely used in the U.S.

The country is also not alone in this kind of modern brutalism. Authorities in South Australia banned spit hoods only recently in 2021, and only after a protracted campaign by Latoya Aroha Rule. Her brother, Wayne Fella Morrison, died in 2016 while restrained by police. Rule formed the Ban Spit Hood Coalition, which advocates for all Australian jurisdictions to ban the devices by law.

Her group’s efforts have focused recently on Australia’s Northern Territory, where about 45% of the population is made up of First Nations people, like Rule and Morrison. Northern Territory police have also “used spit hoods on children at least 27 times since 2016,” according to The Guardian UK. Wondered Rule, “How does the government expect us to trust that they want to engage with First Nations people in a way that protects our wellbeing and gives us a voice when they’re actively subjugating our voices with things like spit hoods?”

After a July 2016 documentary showed disturbing images of a child in the Northern Territory restrained in a chair and with a spit hood over his head, the United Nations called on Australia to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Ending the Horror

One death from a spit hood “is too many,” said George Kirkham, a Florida State University criminology professor who is an expert in police use of force. “We can say more people die from shootings or beatings, but the families of these folks are devastated just the same.”

The Marshall Project and WTSP counted 31 deaths in the past decade alone where spit hoods were used prior to death. But this is likely an undercount since the use of a spit hood in some of those deaths was revealed only after public outcry, protests, or investigative journalism. As the researchers noted, use of spit hoods goes back decades to the 1980s, when some police departments “used spit masks during the early days of the AIDS epidemic” because law enforcement officials “erroneously feared that they could contract the illness if a person with HIV spat on them.” As with HIV, spit masks offer no protection against diseases like COVID-­19, the major driver in spit hood adoption in the last few years.

“Evidence from the manufacturers has now explicitly shown that the most widely used hood in UK policing, the ‘Spit Guard Pro,’ provides no protection against coronavirus spread and may actually increase the risk of transmission,” according to a UK study on spit hoods. “It now transpires that the process of fitting the hood would result in a ‘cloud of virus particles’ and the subsequent struggle is likely to be a ‘significant aerosol generating event.’”

Oliver Feely-­Sprague, the police program director for Amnesty UK, said that the hoods “could actually be seen as an un-­safety device,” adding that this research is “startling, especially for any police officers who might have previously been under the impression that these devices would help keep them safe.”

Despite decades of use wasted on ineffective attempts to reduce disease transmission from detainees, such concerns persist. They have little to no backing in science; only anecdotal evidence exists to support this theory of disease transmission, and even such accounts are exceedingly rare. A safer option, for detainees and captors alike, would be for guards and police to wear personal protective equipment, which is frequently the standard in medical care settings. This would mitigate more of the risk of disease transmission than spit hoods could, and it would seldom result in the death of a detainee.

Finally, according to Ian Freckelton, barrister and professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, the “use of fabric hoods placed over the head of persons in custody has highly adverse connotations and is likely to be experienced by many detainees, both children and adult, to be frightening and demeaning.” Freckelton added that “it is clear that internationally the tide of public opinion has turned against viewing the use of such hooding as legitimate and proportionate. On both physical and mental health grounds, it is time to recognize that the era of the spit hoods should come to an end.”  

Sources: Atlanta Black Star, Florida Today, Florida Times-Union, The Guardian, NT News, New Republic, New York Times, The Marshall Project, National Institutes of Health, USA Today, WTSP

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