Chemical gas used in private Georgia jail. Judge reduces NC victim’s sentence
.jpg "The Charles R. Jonas Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse")
A guard at a private jail in Georgia threw a canister of yellow, chemical smoke at inmates — unprovoked — and left them bloodshot-eyed and faint without medical attention for up to two weeks, according to federal court documents filed in at least eight North Carolina cases.
Some people drained their toilet bowls in order to breathe air through the plumbing as the smoke lingered and covered them in yellow soot. One Charlotte defendant this week saw his sentence reduced because he was exposed to those fumes.
Dequilliam McClure “suffered the harmful and painful effects of the tear gas for at least four days,” according to a motion filed in his case in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.
The 44-year-old coughed and gagged “so much to the point of throwing up multiple times,” wrote his federal public defender, Taylor Goodnight. For four days, he and others were not allowed to shower, were not given exhaust fans to clear the chemical agents and did not receive medical care.
“Two weeks after the guards deployed tear gas, a nurse did an online check in with everyone to see if they were okay,” according to court documents.
District Judge Thomas Cullen, who sentenced McClure on Monday, said the incident was “notable and concerning” and that his pretrial conditions were “more punitive than is acceptable.”
Smoke bombs in private Georgia jail
On Sept. 9, about 175 people from North Carolina were being held in Robert A. Deyton Detention Center cells in Lovejoy, Georgia, when officers told them the building was going into lockdown.
Most complied immediately, according to federal court documents. One used the microwave, one got coffee, and one got ice.
A chief officer “peered into the pod” and noticed those three inmates before saying: “I can’t stand North Carolina detainees. I got something for y’all.”
Then she threw a “chemical gas canister” into the room.
After what witnesses and victims described as an ambush, some inmates seized and passed out from the fumes. One lost consciousness and broke his nose.
Most were confused. Several complaints, largely filed in Spanish, asked why they were locked up and bombed.
“There was no bad behavior on our part, much less aggression,” one translated statement reads. “We only wanted to know why they were locking us… We are people not animals. With words we understand.”
Officers’ words didn’t explain much until The Geo Group, Inc., which owns the private jail, filed an incident report.
The jail said the chemical agent (which was thought to be smoke bombs or tear gas) was pepper spray.
The report says the detainees were “refusing to lockdown for count.” After “several direct orders,” the “detainees continued their defiance and began to don face coverings and assembling in the dayrooms,” according to the jail’s report. That’s when its officers deployed the pepper spray.
In a statement to The Charlotte Observer sent after publication of this article, The Geo Group said “a small group of medium to high custody-level detainees ... were behaving in a combative and disruptive manner,” and “staff made several attempts to deescalate the situation.”
Those attempts failed, according to the jail owner’s statement.
“As a result, the facility’s staff used chemical agents to resolve the incident. We use chemical agents as a last resort and with the utmost seriousness,” a spokesperson wrote. “The facility’s staff follow the U.S. Marshals Service’s Federal Performance-based Detention Standards that govern their use.”
The jail in the statement said people were “immediately... decontaminated, seen by on-site medical staff” and were found to be uninjured.
Several people contend that they weren’t given medical attention and suffered for days.
During a Sept. 25 hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, District Judge Steve Jones said “these are pretrial detainees… their Constitutional rights are more expansive than those who have been convicted, and force is never allowed to be used on detainees who are not actively resisting.”
He called into question some conflicting information presented during the hearing and continued the case, asking for more information from lawyers and the jail.
“There is no lawsuit in front of me, but there is an issue in front of me,” he said. “And I think, as judge, I can’t just turn a blind eye to it.”
Cullen, the federal judge in Charlotte, reduced McClure’s sentence on his guilty plea of possessing a firearm as a felon.
McClure was, from 2000 to 2009, convicted of 1st degree burglary, robbery with a dangerous weapon and larceny of a motor vehicle. In 2018, he was convicted of 2nd degree kidnapping. Since his 2024 arrest on possessing a firearm, McClure — who is also a father of two — completed more than 400 recommended classes and had the support of his mother, fiancée and a family friend in court.
Agreeing with a public defender’s motion detailing the jail’s conditions and a technicality about an old offense that shouldn’t count towards McClure’s record, Cullen reduced the sentence from 57 to 71 months in prison to 48 months.
McClure’s is one of at least eight North Carolina cases affected by what federal public defenders say are unconstitutional conditions that violate protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
‘Unconstitutional’ jailing continues in Kentucky
After the Georgia incident, several North Carolina detainees were transferred to Pike County Detention Center in Kentucky, about 180 miles northwest of Charlotte. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions were already a problem, and the new inmates only exacerbated them, according to court documents.
In a letter to the U.S. Marshal for the Western District of North Carolina, federal public defender John Baker said the jail, which has a capacity of 346, was housing 551 people as of Sept. 30.
The jail failed to provide clean clothes, hygiene products and bedding, he wrote. Under Kentucky law, jails are required to give people three mats to sleep on when a bed is not available.
But several had no mat at all, sleeping on the bathroom floor next to feces and urine in a room that housed 10 too many people, a filing alleged.
Baker said the jail creates “a gladiator situation when distributing toilet paper to the detainees: PCDC staff throw toilet paper into the pods in a bag, and inmates fight over it, with some hoarding multiple rolls of toilet paper and others being left without any.”
People represented by Baker’s office in the Western District of North Carolina are placed in pretrial detention in about 70 percent of cases, compared to the Fourth Circuit’s average of about 54 percent, he said in a statement to The Charlotte Observer.
When Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden in 2023 stopped housing federal detainees, Baker’s clients were “scattered to more than 15 other facilities, many of them out of state.”
“The tyranny of distance already makes meeting our clients face-to-face more difficult, and much more expensive. Now, they’ve been moved to locations that are over-crowded, lack the resources to provide basic necessities, are unsanitary, and in many cases do not provide appropriate medical care or are otherwise constitutionally deficient,” Baker said. “Navigating a federal case while detained far from your lawyer is hard enough; imagine trying to focus on your own defense in a place where you have to worry every day about how your basic human needs will be met. It’s simply untenable.”
Baker’s office, in a motion in another case, asked that a client be released from jail because “the pervasive, continual, and increasingly worse conditions of confinement at PCDC are so grossly unconstitutional.”
One of his clients jailed in Kentucky wrote: “I would not put an animal in here. I don’t expect this to be a hotel but I do not expect to be treated like less than an animal.”
Hearings on the Kentucky jail’s conditions are expected to play out in court in the coming months.
This story was originally published October 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
