Police shooting victim Blake handcuffed to hospital bed

JACOB BLAKE, the man shot seven times in the back by Wisconsin police last Sunday, was handcuffed in his hospital bed despite being paralysed and charged with no crime, it has emerged.

The treatment of Mr Blake, 29, caused outrage yesterday from demonstrators and politicians, before the cuffs were later removed.

Addressing a crowd in Washington DC, Mr Blake’s father said: “There are two systems of justice in the United States. There’s a white system and there’s a black system. The black system ain’t doing so well.”

Thousands of people gathered in Washington yesterday to protest against police brutality on the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech.

In all, around 50,000 people were estimated to have attended the march, which was planned in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the black man killed by a white police officer who kept his knee on his neck.

Addressing the crowd, the civil rights leader’s 12-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, invoked one of the best-known lines of the civil rights leader’s speech, where King envisioned a time his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.

“My grandfather predicted this very moment,” she said. “He said we were moving into a new phase of the struggle. The first phase was the civil rights and the new phase is genuine equality”.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the shooting of Mr Blake sparked fury and deadly violence, anger spread quickly at the news of his handcuffing. “How the f--- do you handcuff Jacob Blake that you paralysed to a hospital bed after you shot him in the back seven times?” said Rashida Tlaib, congresswoman for the neighbouring state of Michigan. Tony Evers, governor of Wisconsin, was asked if he was concerned about Blake being handcuffed. “Hell yes,” he said.

Jacob Blake Sr told the Chicago Sun Times that he had just been to see his son in hospital. “I hate it that he was laying in that bed with the handcuff onto the bed,” he said. Kenosha police told the BBC that Mr Blake was in custody for previous warrants and the handcuffs were policy.

The Blake family attorney, Benjamin Crump, later said that the cuffs had been removed after a date for a court appearance on those warrants was agreed. Mr Crump said it would take a “miracle” for Mr Blake to recover the use of his legs.

Patrick Salvi, Mr Crump’s legal partner, confirmed that a bullet went through Mr Blake’s spinal cord. He had bullets in his stomach, and had to have almost his entire colon removed. He had a bullet in the kidney, and in the arm.

Mr Blake’s shooting sparked five nights of unrest in Kenosha, which on Tuesday night culminated in a Trump-supporting 17-year-old, Kyle Rittenhouse, shooting dead two protesters.

Rittenhouse is in jail his home town of Antioch, Illinois – 20 miles from Kenosha. A planned extradition hearing to send him to Wisconsin for trial was delayed until Sept 25.

On Thursday night it emerged that he is being represented by lawyer L. Lin Wood, nicknamed “attorney for the damned”. Mr Wood represented the security guard falsely accused in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996, and the parents of missing child beauty pageant star Jonbenet Ramsey.

‘There are two systems of justice in the United States... and the black system ain’t doing so well’’