advised. life inside the bergen county jail has been tough enough for william bernard. he says fights and harassment by other inmates has caused his stutter to worsen and sent him into panic attacks. he believes frequent visits to medical for anxiety treatment have led some inmates to believe he s an informant. now charged with threatening to kill his father and threatening the police officers who came to arrest him, he s consumed by thoughts of up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. i m just afraid my father will get on the stand and testify against me. i think that would be a really strong point in a case, especially with a jury. and just just that thought alone that i can get a ridiculous amount of time for something that i didn t do really, really just that thought
like, i wasn t crying or anything, i just told him, stop, that s enough. i ve been here, what, seven months. enough is enough. two months later, william bernard would no longer have to worry about defending himself in jail. his judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity. but the legal definition is different than it sounds. the judge says he was competent to stand trial but not in a proper state of mind on the night he had the conflict with his father that led to his arrest. he was remanded to the state department of health, who will monitor him and he must report to the court every six months for the same period of time he would have gotten in prison had he been convicted. in bernard s case, that s 20 years
since tattooing violates jail rules, bernard is confined to a disciplinary cell he now shares with lewis pizzi. i wanted to represent bronze star or a general star to symbolize the military, because i know a lot of the guys that had passed away had gotten bronze stars, medals of valor, quite a few got purple hearts before they even got killed, so i wanted to go along those lines. and i ll probably get a tattoo of a purple heart later on down the road. bernard says he chose the star to honor men he served with in the army, who had lost their lives. he also has a new war wound of his own, or in this case, a busted lip. from a fight with another inmate. but he says this time, he stood up for himself. and it even seems to have improved his stutter. he tried to man-handle me, grabbed me by my throat. that didn t work. and he punched me. i told him to stop. like, i wasn t crying or anything, i just told him, stop, that s enough.
i guess i got too good of a heart. but nick gets it done. some people, i think, i m like, you know, he s a good guy, just let him go with that. but nick likes to charge everybody for everything. no matter what it is. something simple, give me a snack. sometimes i don t mind doing favors. but nick s good about it, though. we re going to go broke if we don t don t charge for everything. got to look out for me. got to make money. in the end, it s jail, so it s all about me. battaglia got his new position when the inmate who held it prior to him got into trouble. i replaced bernard. he got caught tattooing. they moved him to s-2 now. william bernard had already given himself a new hairstyle. he got into trouble when staff also noticed a freshly made inmate tattoo on his wrist.
it was a little chaotic. for the most part i tried to be nonconfrontational as much as possible. it s not what i prefer, but, unfortunately, i m put in i m put into a situation that there s really not too much i can do. from what i understand, inmate rivera and inmate polanco believe bernard was working with a police agency. since they thought he was snitching, they decided to assault him. both the inmates who attacked bernard were placed in disciplinary segregation. one of them, rafael riviera, says bernard, whose nickname is whitey, had it coming. let me tell you, whitey don t have no friends. because he s a [ bleep ] snitch. working for the police. because he working for the police, every spot that he s going, he going to get [ bleep ] up. and i bet you that [ bleep ] is gonna happen.