Don’t Want Your Dollars Going Towards Transgender Convicts? One Judge Doesn’t Care
Your taxpayer dollars were appropriated towards purchasing women’s underwear for a convicted male criminal
A Florida man accused of murder impregnated a female alleged killer while they were in prison — but the pair never touched each other.
Daisy Link, 29, is charged with second-degree murder after she allegedly killed her husband in 2022.
'Not gonna lie, this is gonna go down in history.'
Joan Depaz, 23, was arrested in October 2020. According to prison records, he's charged with first-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, battery, and criminal mischief.
The two inmates say they communicated with each other through the air conditioning vents in their prison cells.
"You would knock on it, and you can hear the people from the different floors. You would stand on the toilet actually to be able to talk to them," Link told WSVN-TV. "Being in isolation for so long, you begin to spend hours and hours talking to this person, you know, to the point where it’s almost as if you’re in the same room with them."
Link said she and Depaz would pass notes and pictures through the A/C vents.
Eventually they developed a romantic relationship despite never meeting each other.
Depaz had a dream of being a father, but it didn't seem possible since he was facing a lengthy prison sentence if convicted for his alleged crimes.
"I always really wanted to have a baby. And I’m not gonna get to do that for a really long time," Depaz said. He then told Link, "So if I had to choose somebody, you know, it would be you. And she was like, ‘Yeah, we could do that.’”
Depaz devised a plan to make his dream come true.
"I told her a way that one of my friends had showed me through the vent," he explained. "Because the vents are like [an] L-shape, really. It drops right into my vent, from her room, she could throw a pen into the vent, and it’ll land right into my vent.”
Link added, "We had figured out a way to drop the line. It was a line that we had established out of like bedding material."
Depaz said he put semen in plastic wrap "every day like five times a day for like a month straight."
Link recalled, "He would kind of like roll it up, almost like a cigarette, and he would attach it to the line that we had in the vent, and I would pull it through." She said she placed that in a yeast infection applicator and "administered it."
Link stated, "I don’t know what my fate is, you kind of don’t know what’s yours. If we’re gonna go out, might as well just go out with a bang, you know? If it works, it works. But it definitely did."
Link said she got pregnant after just a few attempts, and that she was "very excited" and "ecstatic."
WSVN asked Dr. Fernando Akerman — a fertility specialist and the medical director of the Fertility Center of Miami — if a woman could get pregnant through the method the inmates alleged. Akerman said it's possible but noted that the chances are less than 5%.
On June 19, Link gave birth to a baby at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
The baby is now living with Depaz's mother.
“I can’t believe it worked," Link stated. "I think everything happened for a reason."
“She’s a miracle baby, she’s a blessing,” Link said. “She could be anything. I think that she’s gonna be something great.”
DNA results show Depaz is the father.
When Depaz was asked if he ever had any physical encounters with Link, he said "never."
The pair are now being detained in different jails while they await their trials: Depaz is housed at the Metro West Detention Center; Link is at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. They still talk on the phone and see their daughter during video visits.
"Over here I’m like a celebrity," Depaz excitedly exclaimed. "Not gonna lie, this is gonna go down in history."
The Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department has launched an internal affairs investigation to determine how this could have happened without authorities knowing.
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After decades of outrage and community activism, the city of Philadelphia has now formally apologized for authorizing a local doctor to conduct medical experiments on inmates — most of whom were black and still awaiting prosecution — during the mid-twentieth century.
On Thursday, the office of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney released a formal statement admitting that the city had allowed University of Pennsylvania researcher and dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman to subject poor, mainly black and illiterate inmates at Holmesburg Prison to "pharmaceuticals, viruses, fungus, asbestos, and even dioxin, a component of Agent Orange" while they awaited trial. The experiments continued for approximately two decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s.
"While this happened many decades ago, we know that the historical impact and trauma of this practice of medical racism has extended for generations—all the way through to the present day," Mayor Kenney said. "One of our Administration’s priorities is to rectify historic wrongs while we work to build a more equitable future, and to do that, we must reckon with past atrocities. That is why our Administration today, on behalf of the City of Philadelphia, is addressing this shameful time in Holmesburg’s history."
Officials estimate that as many as 300 inmates were used in the experiments. While those in the program were paid for their participation, many of them had not even been tried for a crime and were desperate for bail money, creating an unethical power structure which compelled many vulnerable inmates to consent to experiments for money and unknowingly expose their bodies to dangerous chemicals.
In 2000, a group of former Holmesburg participants sued the university and Kligman, claiming that they had suffered years of health and psychological problems as a result of the experiments. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed because, the court asserted, the statute of limitations had already expired.
Kligman himself was often well-compensated for the experiments. In some cases, he was paid tens of thousands of dollars to test various chemicals on human beings at Holmesburg. Until his death in 2010, Kligman continued to defend his research methods. "My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake," he said in 2006. "... I’m on the medical ethics committee at Penn, and I still don’t see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing."
Medical experiment rules were different at the time, but they were still regulated. Kligman began the Holmesburg experiments just a few years after the horrors of the medical experiments conducted in Nazi concentration and death camps were made known, and the Nuremberg Code, which strictly limited human medical experiments, had already been passed.
Kligman did make some ethically-sourced advancements in dermatology regarding ailments like athlete's foot and dandruff, and he and research partners Dr. James E. Fulton and Dr. Gerd Plewig developed the popular acne treatment Retin-A, which is still on the market. However, Kligman's legacy remains tied to the Holmesburg experiments, and as a result, his name has since been removed from various University of Pennsylvania honorifics.
Four inmates held at a jail in northwest Arkansas have sued the facility and its medical staff, claiming they were prescribed the controversial antiparasitic drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 without their knowledge.
The inmates, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said they believed they were being treated for COVID-19 with a regimen of "vitamins," "antibiotics," and "steroids" after coming down with the virus in August.
But in a lawsuit filed last week, the inmates claimed medical staff at the Washington County Detention Center had actually administered an unknown dose of ivermectin to them over a period of days and possibly weeks.
"The truth, however, was that without knowing and voluntary consent, plaintiffs ingested incredibly high doses of a drug that credible medical professionals, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all agree is not an effective treatment against COVID-19, and that if given in large doses is dangerous for humans," the lawsuit states.
The defendants in the suit are listed as the Washington County jail, Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder, and Dr. Robert Karas of the jail's health provider, Karas Correctional Health.
According to the Associated Press, Karas acknowledged that the jail had been administering ivermectin to treat COVID-19 since November 2020, and that as of September 2021 more than 250 inmates at the jail had been given the drug. But he responded to the lawsuit by claiming no inmates have been administered the drug without their consent.
The ACLU insisted in their complaint that such is not the case.
"No one — including incarcerated individuals — should be deceived and subject to medical experimentation. Sheriff Helder has a responsibility to provide food, shelter, and safe, appropriate care to incarcerated individuals," Gary Sullivan, legal director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said in a statement.
He added, "The Federal Food and Drug Administration has said that misuse of Ivermectin for COVID-19 can cause serious harm including seizures, comas, and even death. The detention center failed to use safe and appropriate treatments for COVID-19, even in the midst of a pandemic, and they must be held accountable."
Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-winning drug used to treat parasites in animals as well as humans, has become the subject of intense controversy in recent months. While some medical professionals — and media personalities like Joe Rogan — have touted it as an effective treatment for COVID-19, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved it for that use.
Mainstream media networks like CNN have likewise taken it upon themselves to slander the drug, falsely claiming that it is nothing more than a "horse dewormer."