Attorneys say other victims may sue the Mississippi sheriff over allegations of brutality

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Attorneys for two black men who were tortured by Mississippi law enforcement agents said Monday they expect to file more lawsuits on behalf of others who say they were brutalized by officers from the same sheriff’s department .

The Justice Department said Thursday it is opening a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. The announcement came months after five former Rankin County deputies and a former Richland police officer were convicted of federal criminal charges in the racist attack that included beatings, repeated use of stun guns and assaults with a sex toy before a victim to be shot in the mouth.

Attorneys Malik Shabazz and Trent Walker sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department last year on behalf of the two victims, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. The lawsuit is still pending and is seeking $400 million.

“We stand by our belief that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, for the past decade or more, has been one of the worst run Sheriff’s Departments in the country and that’s why the Department of Justice is being released and more disclosures are coming,” Shabazz. he said during a press conference on Monday. “More lawsuits are coming. The fight for justice continues.”

Shabazz and Walker have called on Sheriff Bryan Bailey to resign, as have some local residents.

The two attorneys said Monday that county supervisors should censure Bailey. They also said they believe brutality in the department began before Bailey became sheriff in 2012. And they said Rankin County’s $2.5 million-a-year insurance coverage is far below what would the county should pay the victims of the brutality.

“There needs to be an acknowledgment from the sheriff’s department, from Bailey and from the county that he allowed these officers and this department to operate in a rough state for as long as it negatively impacted the citizens of the county,” said Walker.

The Justice Department will investigate whether the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force and illegal stops, searches and arrests and whether it used racially discriminatory policing practices, the deputy attorney general said last week Kristen Clarke.

The sheriff’s department said it will fully cooperate with the federal investigation and has increased transparency by posting its policies and procedures online.

The five former deputies and a former police officer pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking into a home without a warrant and engaging in an hour-long attack on Jenkins and Parker. Some of the officers were part of a group so willing to use excessive force that they called themselves the Goon Squad. All six were convicted in March, receiving sentences ranging from 10 to 40 years.

The charges followed an Associated Press investigation in March 2023 that linked some of the officers to at least four violent encounters in 2019 in which two black people died.

The Justice Department has received reports of other troubling incidents, including deputies overusing stun guns, breaking into homes, using “shocking racial slurs” and using “dangerous and cruel tactics to attack people in their custody,” Clarke said. .

The attacks on Jenkins and Parker began on January 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence, according to federal prosecutors. A white person called Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two black men were staying with a white woman at a home in Braxton.

Once inside the home, the officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces while taunting them with racial slurs. They forced them to undress and shower together to hide the mess. They taunted the victims with racial slurs and sexually assaulted them.

In addition to McAlpin, the others convicted were former deputies Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield.

Locals saw in the grisly details of the case echoes of Mississippi’s history of racist atrocities committed by people in authority. The difference this time is that those who abused their power paid a heavy price for their crimes, advocates for the victims said.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Goldberg contributed.

Photo: FILE – Lead civil attorney Malik Shabazz, second from right, speaks to reporters with his clients, Michael Corey Jenkins, right, and Eddie Terrell Parker, outside federal court in Jackson in March after the sentencing of the the second of six former Rankin County law enforcement officers who committed numerous acts of torture on Parker and Jenkins in 2023. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

TOPICS
Lawsuits Claims Mississippi