Justice Department opens civil rights probe of sheriff's office after torture of 2 Black men

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into a Mississippi sheriff's department whose officers tortured two Black men in a racist attack that included beatings, repeated use of stun guns and assaults with a sex toy before one of the victims was shot in the mouth, officials said Thursday.

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, according to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.

Five Rankin sheriff's deputies pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking into a home without a warrant and engaging in an hourslong attack on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. A sixth officer, from the Richland Police Department, was also convicted in the attack

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 concerns about the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department did not end with the demise of the Goon Squad,” Clarke said Thursday.

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.

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.

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.

U.S. District Judge Tom Lee called the former officers’ actions “egregious and despicable” and imposed sentences near the top of federal guidelines for five of the six.

“The depravity of the crimes committed by these defendants cannot be overstated,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said after the sentencing.

Malik Shabazz and Trent Walker, the attorneys for Jenkins and Parker, said in a statement Thursday that Rankin County has a “long and extremely violent legacy of departmental abuse under Sheriff Bryan Bailey” and that they applaud the Justice Department for opening the civil rights investigation

“This is a first, critical step in cleaning up the Sheriff’s Department and holding Rankin County legally accountable for the years of constitutional violations against its citizenry,” Shabazz and Walker said. “All of this took place because, despite innumerable warnings, Rankin County and Sheriff Bailey belligerently refused to properly monitor and supervise this rogue department.”

The Rankin County Sheriff's Department is the 11th law enforcement agency in the U.S. to come under a Justice Department investigation since 2021, Clarke said.

The U.S. attorney for the southern district of Mississippi, Todd Gee, said text messages between Goon Squad members, including officers who were not present during the January 2023 assault, showed that deputies “routinely discussed extreme, unnecessary uses of force and other ways to dehumanize residents of Rankin County.” He said deputies shared a video of an officer defecating in the home of one resident.

“In Mississippi and throughout the nation, we have learned over and over that real change in civil rights sometimes requires us to dig up the past, tell painful facts and offer new ways of doing things," Gee said. "We intend for this investigation to do that same work in Rankin County.”

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Associated Press writer Michael Goldberg contributed.