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Judge Rotenberg Center Trial: Tape Shows Teen Being Shocked 31 Times (GRAPHIC VIDEO)

Judge Rotenberg Center Trial

First Posted: 04/12/12 09:54 AM ET Updated: 04/12/12 01:25 PM ET

A jury in Dedham, Mass., saw video this week of an 18-year-old being tied down and shocked 31 times as he screamed in pain.

WARNING: The video below is not suitable for everyone.

The footage was presented by lawyers of Andre McCollins, who is suing the Judge Rotenberg Center for developmentally disabled students, which treated him in part by attaching electrodes to his body and shocking him.

The incident recorded on video took place in 2002 after McCollins refused to take off his coat, according to MyFox Boston.

The station reports that lawyers for the center fought to keep the public from seeing the video, but a judge denied their request.

"These are dramatic tapes, there's no question about that," Edward Hinchey, an attorney who represents two of the Rotenberg Center's clinicians said. "But the treatment plan at the Rotenberg Center, the treatment plan that Andre had in place on October 25, was followed."

The lawsuit is just one of several ongoing investigations and lawsuits involving the center, which remains open, according to Mother Jones magazine.

On its site, the center insists that "JRC relies primarily on the use of positive programming and educational procedures to modify the behaviors of its students. If however, after giving these procedures a trial for an average of eleven months, they prove to be insufficiently effective, JRC then considers supplementing them with more intensive treatment procedures known as aversives."

The center contends that these procedures are only administered after "prior parental, medical, psychiatric, human rights, peer review and individual approval from a Massachusetts Probate Court."

In a 2007 expose on the center, Mother Jones reported that, "Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten."

Mother Jones also notes that the center is the only facility that uses shocks to discipline students, "a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons."

The center did not immediately return a call from The Huffington Post for comment.

WATCH the GRAPHIC video below:

Hat tip: Daily What

 
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11:40 PM on 04/16/2012
Rick Santorum sits on the board of a corporation that runs a chain of these torture facilities. It's all about making a buck. Ethical psychiatrists dismissed the efficacy of electroshock therapy in the 1930's. Multiple prison sentences, huge fines and the closure or Rottenberg are in order. What a disgrace!
09:44 PM on 04/15/2012
this is not treatment it is most deffiently abuse of the highest and worst kind, they say water boarding is torture ha this is torture this place needs closed down and some people thrown in prison amongst suing the he!! out of all those involved and the torture house treatment center
07:47 PM on 04/14/2012
OK I think someone needs a serious beat down!
Give-Me-Anon.tk
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KaliKross
Don't blame me. I'm just the messenger.
10:45 AM on 04/14/2012
If you haven't been to the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum in Los Angeles, funded by the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, it would greatly behoove everyone to do so. It is one thing to hear people talk about psychiatry's abuses, but it is another to stare at the instruments of torture used in psychiatry, all in the name of "treatment."
07:47 PM on 04/14/2012
organisations you mentioned are front groups for the extrememly dangerous Scientology cult. Are you a Scientologist or just happen to go to that exhibition??
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Lalita Amos
My hovercraft is full of eels
08:35 AM on 04/15/2012
I was wondering the same thing.