Times change for Lake County jail
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POLSON — The Lake County Detention Center has gone through many phases.
In 1976, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office moved the jail from the north end of the courthouse basement to the south end, creating much needed space. Current offices for the sheriff, undersheriff and captain used to be cells for inmates. At this time deputies manned the jail.
Soon detention officers were hired to staff the jail, working 12 hour shifts, beginning at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. According to the Lake County website, only one detention officer was on duty and had to wrangle up to and sometimes more than 80 inmates.
Then in March of 1995, prisoner Rodney Sattler, 36, killed another inmate, Raymond Carl Martinson, 22, who was serving time in LCDC for drunken driving. Sattler beat Martinson to death with the steel seat post from an exercise bike.
Sattler was in the Lake County jail awaiting a trial on charges that he tried to kill a member of the Swan River Correction Training Center staff.
Sattler brutally beat and choked Donna Weeks before another trusty interrupted him. Weeks was in a coma for 25 weeks.
A trusty at the facility, Sattler was at the Swan River center serving a 30-year sentence for the 1986 rape and murder of Diane Stout, 25, Thompson Falls.
Sattler was found guilty of Martinson’s murder and was on death row in Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge before he hanged himself in his cell on Feb. 2, 2004.
Martinson’s death prompted a class action suit by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of inmates in the Lake County Jail. Along with other conditions, the county had to cap the number of inmates in the jail and divide inmates into maximum, medium and minimum classifications.
