Another Inmate Charged With Witness Intimidation Using Jail Tablet

Milwaukee County Jail. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Another inmate at the Milwaukee County Jail has been charged with attempting to intimidate a witness using provided communication devices.

It is the first such case since the availability of tablets in the Milwaukee County Jail became an issue in the governor’s race.

In August, Thomas Zollicoffer, in custody at the jail and facing charges in a triple homicide, discussed intimidating a witness using a jail-provided tablet. When his use of a tablet was revealed during a court hearing, Circuit Court Judge David Borowski questioned why he was provided a tablet to begin with. The judge’s comments made the news and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany‘s campaign for governor seized on the issue to attack his opponent in the race, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.

The campaign pointed to another case from May when a man used a jail phone to make more than 1,500 calls to a woman he had previously allegedly threatened to kill. During a campaign stop at the Milwaukee Police Association (MPA) on Sept. 8, Tiffany said Crowley was “putting criminals ahead of victims.”

On Tuesday, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office charged Damian Cosme-Torres with felony intimidation of a victim. Since April, Cosme-Torres has been in custody at the Milwaukee County Jail, and in that time he has made more than 2,400 phone calls and sent messages with a tablet to his alleged victim in a domestic violence case where he is accused of violently beating and strangling her, according to the criminal complaint. In phone calls reviewed by investigators, Cosme-Torres threatened the woman, threatened to take his own life and begged her to have the charges against him dropped.

On Wednesday, the Tiffany campaign again used the issue to attack Crowley, tweeting, “How many more victims must suffer before he puts an end to it?”

On Thursday, Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office officials (MCSO) went before the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Finance with a report intended to dispel some of the misinformation that has been swirling. In the days following Tiffany’s press conference in Milwaukee, Sheriff Denita Ball released a statement explaining her department’s use of the devices. Crowley has previously said his administration is working with the MCSO to determine how these events occurred in the first place.

The sheriff’s office oversees the use of tablets in the jail, issuing one to each of the approximately 20,000 people who are booked into the facility each year. They are not connected to the internet, but instead operate on a closed network maintained by the jail’s telecommunications contractor ICSolutions.

“It cannot just go out there and go to other general websites, as again, some misinformation out there had suggested,” said MCSO Deputy Director David Rugaber.

The tablets can access the law library and educational materials. They also offer entertainment options, but those must be purchased. The tablets can be used to send messages or emails to friends and family, but the recipient must agree to accept the message before they can read it, similar to a collect call, Rugaber said.

Still, the sheriff’s office and the courts could work on communicating better when there is a no-contact order, Rugaber said.

Jail tablets are not new to the jail; MCSO introduced them in 2021 as part of its telecommunications contract with ICSolutions. They were introduced in state prisons in 2018 under former Gov. Scott Walker. Under President Donald Trump‘s administration, the federal Bureau of Prisons recently began providing tablets.

Jail tablets have been criticized in the past by advocates for incarcerated people and activists critical of the private prison industry. Shannon Ross, a formerly incarcerated man and founder of a nonprofit focused on reentry called The Community, testified before the board’s Committee on Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services on Tuesday in favor of jail tablets, which surprised even him.

“I have my own qualms about some of the things that they have been as a money-making device across the country,” Ross said, adding that providers are not always providing access to useful or quality content on the devices. In any case, he said the tablets were a “phenomenal device” that helped him with his education and preparation for a life and career outside of prison.