🧱 Scene: The Procession — Punished for a Bible
This was not a mental health intervention. This was not safety. This was not medical care.
I was placed into a restraint chair because I refused to surrender my Bible.
Two weeks earlier, I had passed an independent forensic psychological examination. I was found competent, stable, and fit to participate in my defense. There was no medical, psychiatric, or behavioral justification for restraints. I was not violent. I was not resisting. I was not unstable.
The sole triggering event was my refusal to give up my religious materials—my Bible and prayer rug. That refusal, grounded in protected religious exercise, was treated as defiance.
Inside Williamson County Jail, religious defiance was met with punishment.
I was on the fourth floor wearing a suicide-prevention smock—an identity-stripping garment justified as “safety.” No shoelaces. No pockets. No dignity. Constant surveillance. Then they brought the restraint chair.
The chair had wheels. It was designed to move. They strapped me in tightly—wrists cinched until circulation failed, hands turning purple—and wheeled me through the jail. Down hallways. Past cells. Past staff. Past detainees. This was not transport. It was a public procession.
I was taken from the fourth floor to intake and left there for approximately two and a half hours. Immobilized. Restrained. No medical monitoring. No evaluation. No documentation justifying the use of force. No legal basis.
I was not being processed. I was not being treated. I was being displayed.
The message was unmistakable: refusal to surrender religious materials would be broken publicly.
This was not accidental. This was not miscommunication. This was a deliberate use of mechanical restraint in direct response to protected religious exercise.
That fact was later confirmed by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Executive Director Brandon S. Wood confirmed that the restraint chair was used because I would not give up my Bible.
Compounding this abuse, the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office does not employ licensed medical staff. According to records maintained by the Texas Medical Board, the individuals providing so-called “medical” oversight within the jail are not licensed physicians and are not licensed medical providers.
This means the decision to restrain me was not made by licensed medical professionals. It was made by jail staff operating without medical licensure, without clinical authority, and without legal justification—while invoking “medical safety” as a pretext.
In Williamson County Jail, unlicensed personnel use medical restraint devices to punish religious conduct, and the state’s jail oversight authority has acknowledged the motive.
The restraint chair was not a safety device. It was a ritualized punishment. A mobile altar of coercion. A warning rendered in steel and straps: constitutional rights exist only at the discretion of the jail.
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LeRoy Nellis 