������Ƶ

Michael Miske Jr. was planning to appeal his convictions shortly after his scheduled sentencing hearing in two months, and he had been feeling hopeful about his chances of a favorable outcome, according to his lawyer, Michael Kennedy. 

Instead the 50-year-old — who in July was convicted on 13 federal counts in connection with his operation of an organized crime ring – was found dead Sunday at Honolulu’s Federal Detention Center in an apparent suicide.

The Honolulu prison facility released virtually no information Monday about the circumstances surrounding Miske’s death but questions have swirled in the aftermath about how he was able to take his own life in a facility charged with preventing inmates from harming themselves.

Miske died in a Bureau of Prisons facility near the Honolulu airport that feeds into a vast federal system that houses nearly 160,000 inmates. That system was criticized in a report earlier this year for failing to follow its own suicide prevention procedures, a shortcoming that might have increased the risk for some inmates

Miske’s cousin, Maryanne Miske, said in an email that his family was “extremely disappointed” in the federal government and prison for failing to keep him safe. 

Prison Policy On Suicides

A Bureau of Prisons’ policy requires staff to take a series of steps before a suicide happens. They are expected to identify potentially suicidal inmates and place them on suicide watch in a designated housing area that allows for consistent monitoring. 

Staff or trained inmate observers are responsible for keeping the person under constant observation and are supposed to document observed behavior in a log book, the policy says.

Attorneys and other officials would not say if Miske was on suicide watch at the time, and little else is known about his death. A news release from the Bureau of Prisons on Monday said only that Miske was found unresponsive at about 9:15 a.m., and did not specify whether he was found in a cell or a common area. One from the Honolulu medical examiner said “the cause and manner of death are both listed as pending.”

Prisoners are at highest risk for suicides at certain key moments, according to Dr. Pablo Stewart, a clinical professor at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii.

High-risk events include when prisoners are first booked, when they are convicted and immediately after sentencing, Stewart said.

“These are extra high risks that a reasonable agency should be aware of, and you put the person at a higher suicide observation, and you have your mental health staff speak with them until you feel safe that the person is not at imminent risk of suicide,” Stewart said.

Yet none of those align perfectly with Miske’s legal journey: He was convicted of 13 federal counts in July, including two that carry a penalty of life in prison. His sentencing was scheduled for Jan. 30.

After any suicide, the Bureau of Prisons policy also requires an after-action review and a more comprehensive study known as a “psychological reconstruction report.”

That reconstruction report features details about the deceased prisoner, including a description of the inmate’s background, personality, legal history, and medical and mental health care histories.

It also lays out circumstances leading up to the suicide, provides a full description of the suicide act and scene, and includes conclusions and recommendations from a reviewing psychologist. A prison psychologist from another facility is supposed to conduct that review.

Contributing Factors

, a former prison warden and an expert on prison and jail suicides, said that given Miske’s violent background, an important issue will be whether he was alone in his locked cell, which would rule out his death coming at the hands of someone else.

Miske was facing two life sentences, and usually a person facing such a severe sentence goes into a period of depression, Vare said. That suggests the review should also focus on whether Miske made any suicidal statements in the days leading up to his death.

Staffing shortages can be a factor in prison and jail suicides, because staff may not actually do the required visual checks of each inmate, Vare said. “Sometimes people are dead for hours when that happens.”

Multiple system failures, including staffing shortages, were cited as contributing to Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in 2019, released by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. Epstein hanged himself while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges.

Vare said the Bureau of Prisons’ training for suicide prevention “is pretty robust, but that said, whether or not they actually apply what the training is may be a whole different story.”

Bureau Of Prisons Recently Criticized For Failures

A study by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General identified deficiencies in inmate mental health assessments before their deaths that “prevented some institutions from adequately addressing inmate suicide risks.”

That review covered 187 suicides in federal facilities from 2014 to 2021, and found that “a combination of recurring policy violations and a multitude of institution operational failures contributed to inmate suicides.”

It also reported that more than half of the prisoners who died by suicide were housed in a cell alone, which the report said increases suicide risk.

“We also found that staff did not sufficiently conduct required inmate rounds or counts in over a third of the inmate suicides during our scope,” it said. “Such deficiencies helped foster conditions in which inmates were able to advance their suicidal ideations and created increased opportunities for them to die by suicide.”

The report concluded that some inmates who later died by suicide were assessed and assigned to “potentially inappropriate” mental health care levels, meaning they were designated as being a lower risk for suicide when they should have been classified as higher risk.

Quality Of Life At Federal Detention Center

Ken Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, said hopelessness can set in when a person is facing life in prison, and depression can be exacerbated around the holidays. 

Quality of life in the Federal Detention Center, where Miske had been held since July 2020, is also much worse than it is in a federal correctional institution, where inmates are sent after sentencing, Lawson said. Many federal defendants from Hawaii serve their sentences at a facility in Sheridan, Oregon, where former Honolulu police chief Louis Kealoha is serving a seven-year sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Correctional institutions offer inmates more activities, education and work opportunities than detention centers.

The Honolulu facility currently holds , making it one of the smaller federal detention centers. According to the U.S. Department of Justice study of jail and prison suicides, 97% of state and federal facilities with fewer than 500 inmates reported no suicides in 2019.

But experts concede that preventing every death may not be possible.

Stewart, who has reviewed hundreds of suicides at facilities across the county, said that even if correctional workers do everything properly, “if a person wants to kill themselves in a correctional setting, they can do it.”

Although Miske’s lawyer said he had been hopeful about his chances of a successful appeal, federal convictions are rarely reversed. In 2023, just 6% of criminal appeals ended in a reversal, according to statistics.

Despite the low success rate, Megan Kau, a Honolulu trial attorney and former candidate for city prosecutor, said she had expected Miske to see the appeal process through. 

“I anticipated him fighting everything on appeal,” she said. “That’s why I was shocked. He was such a fighter.”