Protesters: Holding pens unfit for voting machines

By Mike McPhee The Denver Post Article Last Updated: 08/15/2008 06:56:32 PM MDT Convention protesters said this afternoon that the "secret jail" the city has set up for people arrested during the upcoming Democratic National Convention used to house the city's voting machines until the building was declared unfit for the machines. At a press conference in front of the holding pens the city has built inside a dilapidated warehouse at 38th Avenue and Steele Street, protester Glenn Spagnuolo said the city stored its voting machines there until officials said the building was too hot for the machines and was without a fire sprinkler system. "This facility has a long history," he told a small gathering of reporters. "The city pulled its voting machines from here because the building gets too hot. Yet now they'll put people in there who use those machines to vote. "There are no toilets there. There's no water, no fire suppression. The city should be ashamed. It needs to stop criminalizing protests." The Denver Sheriff's Department insists that anyone taken to the center will be there only a few hours while they're fingerprinted, issued a court date and released after posting bail. Others will be transferred to facilities designed for longer detention. Sheriff's spokesman Frank Gale told the Associated Press that anyone needing bathrooms, running water or telephones would be escorted to them. The dozen or so pens are made of chain link fencing with coiled concertina wire along the top. Today, doors into the building were locked with the windows covered with cardboard. When a reporter looked through a cutout in the cardboard, an officer inside quickly closed the cutout window with a piece of cardboard. Behind the speakers, a dozen protesters, some wearing bandanas over their faces, held banners. One read "Gulag DNC" in reference to the notorious work camps in the former Soviet Union. Spagnuolo said the city has lied several times recently, denying that the holding pens even existed. "Every time the city moves its lips, they lie," he said. "We asked them if a detention center existed. They told us it will be business as usual, don't worry about it. "Apparently, the training received by the undercover officers in charge of crowd control didn't sink in. They're the guys who arrested John Heaney and broke his two front teeth smashing his head into the asphalt." Police launched an internal investigation after a videotape shot outside Coors Field during the Rockies' season-opener April 4 shows officers Michael Cordova and James Costigan slamming Heaney's face into the ground, knocking his teeth out. "We're asking that those officers be off-duty during the convention," said Spagnuolo. Tom Mesnick, another protest organizer, said the city has been acting in bad faith, the same way New York City officials did when the made a sweep arrest of 1,800 people four years ago during the Republican National Convention. "New York is still dealing with the lawsuits," Mesnick said. "They've paid out more than $1 million in claims. They arrested everybody, even people going home from work."