During a search on their home last year, six officers entered a guilty plea to beating two black men and shot one in the mouth.
After pleading guilty to federal civil rights violations for torturing and sexually assaulting two black men and one white guy who has remained unnamed up until now, six former law enforcement officers who went by the name “Goon Squad” will begin serving their sentences in Mississippi today.
The agents will appear in federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, over the course of the next three days. Each could receive a sentence of at least ten years in jail. Victims will be given the chance to tell their story, and prosecutors are likely to go into detail about the officers’ violent behavior.
If the officers choose to discuss their offenses or beg the judge for leniency, they may make their first public speech.
The first sentencing is set for Tuesday morning for Hunter Elward, who entered a guilty plea to shooting one of the victims. In separate proceedings, the other agents will receive their sentences.
Following a report about suspicious activities, five Rankin County deputies and a Richland police detective raided the homes of Eddie Parker, 36, and his friend Michael Jenkins, 33, bringing the sheriff’s department in Rankin County, a suburban enclave outside of Jackson, to the attention of the country.
The males were repeatedly shocked with Tasers, beaten, had their hands bound, and had a sex toy used against them by the officers as a means of sexual abuse. Mr. Jenkins was shot by Elward, who stuck his gun in his mouth, fracturing his jaw and almost killing him.
Parker stated at a press conference on Monday, “I saw the devil in the eyes.”
Federal prosecutors believe that the cops falsified reports that Jenkins had pointed a BB gun at them in order to cover up the shooting and destroyed evidence.
In a another case, three department aides also entered guilty pleas; however, the specifics of the occurrence have not been disclosed by the prosecution yet. In that instance, 28-year-old Alan Schmidt is the victim, and prosecutors are scheduled to read a statement he wrote.
Although charges against Rankin County deputies have so far only addressed these two instances, residents in the county’s poorer neighborhoods claim the sheriff’s office has been targeting them with comparable levels of violence on a regular basis.
The Rankin Sheriff’s Department deputies, many of whom went by the nickname “Goon Squad,” broke into homes in the middle of the night for almost 20 years, handcuffing and torturing victims in order to extract information or confessions. This information was revealed in an investigation published in November by The New York Times and Mississippi Today.
Numerous reports from people who claimed to have seen or experienced the raids state that officers were chasing drug arrests and beat and held down people until they were bloody and bruised, dripping molten metal onto another man’s skin, and forcing a stick down one man’s throat until he puked.
A large number of individuals who reported being victims of violence went on to file formal complaints or lawsuits describing their interactions with the agency. A few claimed to have spoken with Bryan Bailey, the sheriff of Rankin County, personally and been unresponsive.
Local activists and the NAACP have called for Sheriff Bailey’s resignation; he has denied knowledge of the instances.
The Goon Squad case “was going to make it into the history books,” according to Malcolm Holmes, a professor in the University of Wyoming’s school of criminal justice and sociology.
He stated, “There is a lot of well-documented evidence that this is a pattern of behavior,” adding that the case had exposed “something we’ve covered up for a long time, especially in rural America.”
It is anticipated that additional information on the violence committed by Rankin County deputies, including what occurred to Mr. Schmidt, will be disclosed during this week’s sentencing proceedings.
Schmidt discussed what happened in December 2022 when he was pulled over by a Rankin County deputy for driving with an expired license plate for the first time in public during an interview with The Times and Mississippi Today previous week.
Shortly after, policemen Daniel Opdyke, Hunter Elward, and Christian Dedmon arrived at the scene, according to the federal indictment. Schmidt stated there were two other policemen there during the arrest, including the one who was tasked with holding him.
Schmidt alleged that after Dedmon placed a gun to his head and fired rounds into the air, threatening to toss his body into the Pearl River, he was accused by the officers of taking tools from his boss.
Schmidt remarked, “I thought this was it.” “I will never see my family again.”
Schmidt claimed that after Dedmon and the other officers had beaten him and trapped his arm in an anthill, they had repeatedly shocked him with a Taser.
Schmidt claimed that as the victim cried out for rescue and kicked the officer, Dedmon allegedly rubbed his genitalia into his face and exposed buttocks.
Schmidt remarked, “It still runs through my head constantly.”