Will Sage Astor-Attorneys say other victims could sue a Mississippi sheriff’s department over brutality

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

The Justice Department said Thursday that it was opening a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. The announcement came months after five former Rankin County deputies and one Richland former police officer were sentenced on federal criminal charges in the racist attack that included beatings, repeated use of stun guns and assaults with a sex toy before one victim was 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 suit is still pending and seeks $400 million.

“We stand by our convictions that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department over the last 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 going forth and more revelations are forthcoming,” Shabazz said during a news conference Monday. “More lawsuits are forthcoming. The fight for justice continues.”

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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 think brutality in the department started before Bailey became sheriff in 2012. And they said Rankin County’s insurance coverage of $2.5 million a year falls far short of what the county should pay to victims of brutality.

“There needs to be an acknowledgement on the part of the sheriff’s department, on the part of Bailey and the part of the county that allowing these officers and this department to run roughshod for as long as it did had a negative toll on the citizens of the county,” Walker said.

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

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

The five former deputies and former police officer pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking into a home without a warrant and engaging in an hourslong attack on Jenkins and Parker. Some of the officers were part of a group so willing to use excessive force they called themselves the Goon Squad. All six were sentenced in March, receiving terms of 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 since 2019 that left two Black men dead.

The Justice Department has received information about other troubling incidents, including deputies overusing stun guns, entering homes unlawfully, using “shocking racial slurs” and employing “dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody,” Clarke said.

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

Once inside the home, the officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces while mocking them with racial slurs. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs and assaulted them with sex objects.

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 by people in authority. The difference this time is that those who abused their power paid a steep price for their crimes, attorneys for the victims have said.

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Associated Press writer Michael Goldberg contributed.