Men's County Jail Visitor Viciously Beaten by Guards

Carrillo several days after being beaten

http://www.laweekly.com/2011-05-26/news/men-s-county-jail-visitor-viciously-beaten-by-guards/

Shackled in handcuffs, Gabriel Carrillo was being detained in a small break room near the visitors' lobby in Men's Central Jail when, he says, a Sheriff's deputy knocked him to the floor with an uppercut.

The Men's Central Jail

Carrillo, 5 feet 6 and 160 pounds, doubled over in pain. Three deputies began kicking and punching the baby-faced 23-year-old in his head and thigh, tearing his white T-shirt while blood splattered on his blue jeans and Air Jordans.

With each blow, Carrillo felt his body jerk as his head bounced up and down on the cold, county building floor. He briefly lost consciousness, only to wake to the sting of punches to his head and face.

Through eyes purple with bruises and nearly swollen shut, Carrillo could see blood pouring out of his head onto the floor.

"I'm not fucking resisting," he cried out.

Suddenly, Carrillo felt a blast of chemical spray. He was blinded and gasping for air as more punches pummeled his increasingly numb legs and torso. It was like being caught in a violent ocean wave, Carrillo recalls. Every time he tried to come up for air, another blow drove him back under.

"I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Carrillo wheezed.

"Shut the fuck up," Carrillo claims a deputy said. "If you can talk, you can breathe."

Finally, Carrillo lay motionless, watching officers wipe his blood off the floor with clean towels, thinking to himself, "How did this happen? All I was trying to do was visit my brother in jail."

Carrillo arrived at Men's Central Jail, a dungeonlike fortress near downtown Los Angeles, around noon on Feb. 26 with his girlfriend, Grace Torres, to visit his younger brother, who was locked up on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.

It was a Saturday, and Torres was on call for her job at an employment agency. She says she was afraid of being fired if she missed a call, so she tucked her cellphone into her boot and sneaked it into the visitors' lobby, despite the signs prohibiting it. Carrillo, a general laborer who helped build a stage for an Academy Awards after-party next to the El Capitan Theater, says he forgot he had a phone in his pocket.

While they waited, Torres moved to scratch her foot and her phone fell onto the floor. Within minutes, she claims, deputies had confiscated the phones, handcuffed Carrillo and taken the two of them into the break room, where a deputy pushed Carrillo into the side of a refrigerator.

Carrillo admits that he mouthed off, telling the officer, "If I weren't in these handcuffs, it'd be a different situation and I wouldn't let myself get thrown around like this." He says he was trying to compensate for being scared.

The deputy, however, called for backup.

When the beating was over, an ambulance took Carrillo to the hospital. He could not open his right eye and received stitches above his eyebrow. A doctor told him he'd suffered chemical burns from the toxic spray. Photos obtained by L.A. Weekly show clear evidence of a severe beating to his head.

The county is prosecuting Carrillo, claiming he attacked the deputies and that the force was justified.

The beating was unusual in that Carrillo was a visitor and not an inmate. But the abuse he suffered is not uncommon. A growing chorus of inmates tells of broken noses, shattered jaws and other injuries from sustained beatings by Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies who serve as guards at Men's Central Jail.

Conditions at the jail, the largest in the world, have long been considered deplorable. For more than 35 years, civil rights organizations have worked with the Sheriff's Department to make improvements. But in recent years, they say, the severity and brazenness of abuse have escalated.

Men's Central Jail "is the worst facility in the country," says Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney for the ACLU of Southern California — the only outside organization today with regular access inside the jail. The jail "is the most violent, the most dangerous, and it's a cancer right in the heart of Los Angeles."

Twenty-five years ago, a decade after the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit to improve conditions at L.A. County jails, the civil rights organization was allowed to place a monitor inside the jails. One of the hopes was to curtail jailer abuse of inmates, 90 percent of whom are awaiting disposition of their cases and thus have not been found guilty of crimes.

Yet today, the number of inmate complaints to the ACLU about abuse by jailers at all county lockups is greater than ever, with a disproportionate number specifically from inmates at Men's Central Jail.

The ACLU says that as of a couple of years ago, it was receiving from inmates in county lockups three to four complaints per week that allege unprovoked abuse by deputies. It now fields six to seven complaints a week ago.

"Los Angeles County jails are rapidly developing a reputation as perhaps the worst in the nation," says Margaret Winter, a Washington, D.C., attorney who leads the ACLU's National Prison Project effort to combat abuses in jails. "I'm basing that it's the worst on that I've never seen this accumulation of violence. The severity, the frequency and the boldness is stunning, and I believe unprecedented."

Carrillo after his face healed

Winter recently handled a trial in Arizona involving abuses in the Maricopa County jail under hard-line Sheriff Joe Arpaio. She says, "The degree of violence is no comparison with the frequency and savagery we see in L.A. County jails."

Kelly Knapp, an attorney for the Prison Law Office in San Francisco, says L.A. County's Men's Central Jail "is known as notoriously bad in California and nationwide. It's crumbling down and is overcrowded ... and I think when we talk about conditions, old and crumbling down, they go hand in hand with abuse."

The department has constructed a cone of silence around the issue of guard-on-inmate abuse and, according to the ACLU, does not disclose much information about excessive force — not details of internal investigations, not how it determines what is or is not "reasonable force," not the disciplinary actions, if any, taken against offending guards, not the number of complaints inmates make through the inmate grievance process. Attorneys who sue on behalf of abused inmates are prohibited from discussing a deputy's record of using force or the number and nature of complaints against him.

Referring to the Maricopa County case, Winter says, "We've had nothing like the problems in getting the statistical information that we're having in L.A. County."

In response to a public records request from the Weekly, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department revealed that between 2005 and 2010, there were 5,977 use-of-force incidents in all of the county's jails. Men's Central Jail was home to 1,958 of those incidents.

Lt. Mark McCorkle, charged with supervising the county's jails, says that in most cases the use of force is found to have been justified and that no criminal act or internal-policy violation occurred. After reviewing the above statistics, he points out that the number of incidents overall has declined recently throughout the county jails — from 1,051 in 2009 to 708 in 2010.

By refusing to release specific details about those cases in L.A., however, the Sheriff's Department makes it impossible for the public to determine the extent of the abuse problem in its jails. Absent those details, the sole source of information about the jails comes from the ACLU, which is limited to documenting claims of abuse and adding them to a thick federal court case file. The organization has no power to investigate.

Somewhat surprising, perhaps, is that critics of the jail and Sheriff Lee Baca have found one fact to agree upon: Men's Central Jail is unsupervisable and should be shuttered.

Given the county's current budget crisis, however, Baca says there's no money to build a new jail. So despite the troubling conditions and rising tide of inmates complaining to the ACLU about being beaten and treated poorly, life at Men's Central Jail marches on, one allegation of abuse at a time.

Located just east of Chinatown, about a mile from downtown, Men's Central Jail is a testament to hulking, early 1960s jail construction. At nearly 1 million square feet, with a current average of about 4,000 inmates housed there daily, the building has a massive, daunting exterior. Its interior, however, is medieval.

Many of the floors are made up of long corridors lined with cells, making it impossible to see into any one cell without standing directly in front of it. From a supervision standpoint, Men's Central Jail is a nightmare.

Baca and the ACLU blame the layout of Men's Central Jail, in part, for the difficulties overseeing abusive jailers.

"The way the cells are lined up and the way they crowd people in there, Central Jail looks like the hulls in slave ships or the bunks in Dachau," Eliasberg says. "They're in rows and rows of cells, and to think you can monitor and run something like that safely is insane."

For many years, the county's Office of Independent Review and the ACLU have advocated placing cameras throughout the jail to document what occurs. "There are times when deputies are not being held accountable because we can't reach the level of proof we need to go forward," says Michael Gennaco, chief attorney in the Office of Independent Review, which reviews force incidents and Baca's disciplinary decisions. "Cameras tend to be tiebreakers."

Some cameras do exist; however, Gennaco says many of the ones in Men's Central Jail are outdated and don't work well.

Eliasberg says the technology for camera surveillance in jails has existed since the 1980s, yet L.A. County has dragged its feet. "The county says it has no money for cameras, yet they have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay out lawsuit settlements," he says. In response to a public information request from the Weekly, Los Angeles County says it has paid out only $738,850 from 2008 through 2010 to settle lawsuits alleging abuse by jail deputies.

"We've got to start aggressively pursuing getting cameras in there," says Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for Baca. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors recently approved $7.2 million in one-time funding for closed-circuit television monitoring. But for it to be effective, even the Sheriff's Department concedes there needs to be a camera aimed down each hallway — and into nearly every one of the 2,825 cells.

Peter Eliasberg and Esther Lim of the ACLU

Without those cameras, inmates — and the ACLU — are in a position of weakness. "After a beating, deputies often claim that the prisoners were the attackers, even though many were handcuffed ... cowering from incoming blows," the ACLU wrote in a report.

Carrillo, the laborer who was beaten while visiting his brother, says he was handcuffed during the entire beating and that the officers were trying to teach him a lesson for his smart-aleck remarks.

The deputies, however, state in their reports that Carrillo was not in cuffs and fought wildly, punching and kicking officers as they tried to book him for illegally possessing a phone. They claim the use of force was necessary to subdue him.

After the incident, Carrillo was charged with battery on a custodial officer, resisting an executive official and attempted escape during lawful detention.

"When I read the police report," Carrillo says, "I was blown away how they created such a convenient story for themselves."

Nearly all of those making allegations of abuse at Men's Central Jail face the same fundamental problem as Carrillo: It's their word versus the cops', and the cops rarely lose.

The ACLU's Eliasberg says, "At best you get witness corroboration from other inmates, but by and large it's almost always the inmate against a number of deputies, and juries are very sympathetic to officers."

On Jan. 24 of this year, the current ACLU jail monitor, Esther Lim, reported that she saw a pair of deputies savagely beat inmate James Parker at the county's Twin Towers jail, next door to Men's Central Jail. In a federal court declaration, Lim said the officers continued to beat Parker even though he seemed unconscious and was not fighting back. Parker "looked like a mannequin that was being used as a punching bag," she said.

The sheriff's log, according to news reports, said Parker attacked the deputies and would not stop until he was hit with a stun gun.

Lim, who is relatively new to her job, had never personally filed a declaration against the Sheriff's Department, Eliasberg says. After she did so, the department fired back. Instead of treating Lim as a witness to a potential crime, Sheriff's Department spokesman Whitmore questioned Lim, asking in a widely distributed Associated Press report why she waited several weeks to file a declaration in court and did not report the abuse right away.

Eliasberg has said Lim did not report the abuse immediately because she was scared and because more than a dozen other incidents of abuse reported by the ACLU in the last year had gone nowhere at the department.

Shortly after the Parker incident, the ACLU asked Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, to comment on Whitmore's remarks. Richman issued a stern statement, saying, "It is odd, and indeed troubling, when a law enforcement spokesman publicly disparages the credibility of a potential prosecution witness."

Whitmore has said that both Internal Affairs and the Office of Independent Review are examining the case, and Eliasberg says he has asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate and is optimistic that the feds are looking into it.

Winter, of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says she recently took an informal survey of prison litigators across the country and discovered that most are aware of incidents similar to what Lim witnessed, "in that the inmate claimed they were subjected to a severe beating while the jailers were calling out to an unresisting inmate, 'Stop resisting, stop resisting,' using the typical script as a cue that the victim will be made the criminal.

"What was unique, which no one around the country had ever heard of, was the boldness and brazenness for an attack like this to happen in essentially a public area of the jail," Winter says. "I think this clearly indicates that the violence has been so deeply rooted and has for so long been accepted by the top brass that there's no sense of shame or fear of being punished. There is a boldness that is breathtaking here and that doesn't exist anywhere else."

The ACLU began its journey toward eradicating cruel and unusual punishment from the L.A. County jails in 1975, when it sued the county and the sheriff in federal court. The county lost, reforms were made and conditions slowly began to improve. But when jail populations started to explode in the 1980s, those improvements vanished, and conditions went south. In 1985, the county agreed to allow an ACLU member inside the jails to monitor conditions as a compromise and alternative to the ACLU hauling the county back into court for contempt.

Now, more than 25 years later, the ACLU says its Prison Project team receives an average of 4,500 inmate complaints a year, on issues that include violence, retaliation, mental health care and unsanitary conditions. From March through August of 2010, the ACLU fielded more than 70 complaints about excessive force or retaliation by deputies from inmates inside Men's Central Jail. The organization has received hundreds of like complaints over the past two years from inmates at the jail. The ongoing federal court case file is bursting with declarations from inmates telling stories of bone-rattling abuse.

ACLU staffer said she witnessed deputies beating inmate at Twin Towers

http://witnessla.com/aclu/2011/admin/dangerous-jails-the-witness-part-1/

Part 1: THE WITNESS

On Monday, January 24, 2011, ACLU Jails monitor Esther Lim was seated in one of the seven cubicles reserved for attorneys in module 142 in the Twin Towers facility of the Los Angeles County jail system. She was there in cubicle number five (of the seven) in order to meet with an inmate named Christopher Brown, who was now seated in the matching cubicle directly opposite her. Lim and Brown were separated by a 2 by 3 foot window and spoke to each other via the telephones mounted on the right side of each cubicle.

It is a set-up akin to that depicted in nearly every prison visiting scene you’ve ever seen in the movies or on TV. Except that in Twin Towers, the public visiting area is located on the 1st floor near to the exit, whereas the attorney visiting rooms are inside the various modules in the jail’s interior.

Lim is the latest in a string of So Cal ACLU jails monitors. The monitors were originally put in place after the ACLU sued the County of Los Angeles in federal court in the mid-1970s over what it believed to be unconstitutional conditions at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. The ACLU won the lawsuit—known as Rutherford v. Block, now just called Rutherford, for short—and, as part of the subsequent ruling that mandated improvements in jail conditions, the court appointed the Southern California branch of the ACLU as monitor, to make sure that the ordered changes were being made. Nearly four decades later, some changes have been accomplished, while others are depressingly slow in coming. More recently, however, the sheriff’s department installed special hot lines that allow inmates to call the ACLU to report complaints that they would like to see addressed.

Lim, who is in her late 20s, has been the monitor since last October and visits one of the LA County jail facilities every day of the work week except for Thursday. Much of her time on site is spent talking to inmates who have requested a meeting to tell her about some problem or other. The most common problems reported are things like lack of access to adequate medical care, too little out-of-cell time and not enough recreation.

Sometimes, however, the complaints are more dramatic and involve accusations of excessive use of force and other forms of brutality by the deputies toward the prisoners. Yet such tales are difficult to verify. An inmate who claims he was beat up by sheriff’s deputies usually has no witnesses other than the deputies he has accused of wrongdoing.

However on Monday January 24th, when a beating was alleged to have occurred between an inmate and two deputies, this time an outside witness present.

According to Lim, the incident in question began after she had been talking to Brown for about 30 minutes. She heard what she thought sounded like some kind of scuffle coming from the “staging area” outside two windows that were located on the far right wall of the attorneys room. She later described the noises in a sworn deposition as the “sounds of fists hitting a body.” Lim said she also heard thuds against the attorney room wall underneath the windows, and “other noises that sounded like a fight.” Hearing the commotion, Brown left his cubicle and moved toward the windows and the noises. Lim paused for a moment, then did the same.

What Lim saw at first confused her. An African American prisoner, whom she later learned was a 35-year-old named James Parker, was lying face down on the floor unmoving while, according to Lim, two sheriff’s deputies were punching and “kneeing” the prone man while simultaneously yelling “Stop fighting!” and alternately, “Stop resisting!”

For the first few seconds, Lim could not make sense of the scene. She could see, she said, that Parker was neither fighting back nor was he resisting. He wasn’t even flinching, despite the force of the blows. Instead, he was lying motionless on the floor as if unconscious.

With a nod toward the scene outside the windows, Brown turned briefly to Lim and shrugged. “See. It’s happening now,” he said.

After a bunch of punches, said Lim, one of the deputies tased Parker —first three or four times in his leg, then three or four more times in his back. All the while he kept shouting the same bizarre monotonic chant: “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!”

Parker’s body convulsed at each tasing, then went limp again. Lim thought irrationally that it looked as if the deputies were using a mannequin in inmate garb as a punching bag.

After about a minute of disbelieving observation Lim banged hard on the window with the palm of her right hand, hoping to get the deputies’ attention. The LASD deputies—whom she would later learn were named Ochoa and Hirsch—did not look up. Eventually Deputy Ochoa did look up and, according to Lim, looked at her hard and motioned her emphatically away from the window.

Spooked, Lim dutifully moved away. By that time a frightened Brown had also retreated from the window back to his side of the attorney client cubicle—except that he was no longer sitting in a chair, but lying on the ground as if trying to become invisible. After exchanging a few words with Brown, Lim gathered her purse and other belongings, left the attorney room and walked quickly to the elevator, which she took the first floor, then headed outside to the parking lot. She passed three or four deputies on her way out, but said nothing to them. “I was scared,” she said later. After watching the beating, she was no longer sure whom she could trust.

Peter Eliasberg and Esther Lim of the ACLU

Instead of telling deputies, Lim called her boss, Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU/SC’s managing attorney. The ACLU immediately filed a complaint.

The next morning, Lim was back at the office reviewing the jail logs and reports that she gets from the sheriff’s department every day via email. She noted that there was a “Significant Use of Force” log entry for Twin Towers for Monday, the 24th.

The entry describing an altercation between two unnamed deputies and an inmate named James Parker who, according to the log, attacked the deputies and continued attacking even while being tased in the leg and the back.

Stunned at the alternate version in the log, Lim went to Twin Towers in the afternoon and where she talked with Brown briefly and arranged for a longer meeting in the attorney’s room the next day, Wednesday.

On Wednesday Lim brought one of the ACLU’s attorneys with her and the two met with Brown, who told the attorney and the monitor what had happened after Lim left the jail.

http://witnessla.com/aclu/2011/admin/dangerous-jails-the-witness-part-2/

Part 2: Brown’s account of what happened
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The ACLU has filed dozens of complaints over the years alleging that sheriff’s deputies inside LA County jail have beaten or otherwise mistreated inmates. As recently as May of last year, they released a 64-page report  on the LA County jail system charging that it fostered a “culture of fear and violence.” However, according to Peter Eliasberg, the managing attorney for the Southern California branch of the ACLU, in most cases, the only witnesses to incidents of alleged mistreatment by deputies are the deputies themselves who say the beatings et al never happened, and prisoners whose accounts are chronically disbelieved. Thus the complaints almost never go anywhere.

Then on January 24 of this year, Esther Lim, the ACLU’s newest jails coordinator, said she witnessed two deputies brutally beating and tasing an inmate named James Safari Parker, a 35-year-old who was awaiting trial on a nonviolent marijuana charge. At the time of the incident in question, Lim was visiting another inmate, a man named Christopher Brown, who also witnessed the alleged beating.

In Part 1 of this story you can read Esther Lim’s account of the incident.
______________________________________________________

Christopher Brown was in one of the cubicles at the Twin Tower jail facility that is reserved for attorneys who need to meet with their clients. He was talking to ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim who was sitting in the twin of his cubicle, right across from him, separated by a glass window. All at once, Brown said, he heard loud “cussing” outside the attorneys’ room. Someone said the word, “motherfucker.” Then Brown heard what he later described as scuffling noises, boots squeaking and various thumps and thuds. A fight, he thought.

Brown stood up and strode to the locked door that separates the attorneys’ room from the “staging area,” a large space that contains the jail module’s recreation area. The door featured two windows—one in the top half of the door, the second in the lower half— that allowed Brown to peer out at the staging area to see what it was that was causing all the scuffling noises.

“I saw an inmate who looked African-American, who I later learned was Parker,” Brown stated in his signed declaration about the events of that day. “He had big braids that were sticking out from his head and [he] was standing next to the water fountain in the staging area with his hands covering his face, with two deputies punching him.”

At that point, Brown said, he could only see the deputies backs, but he could see their punching motions clearly. He glanced at Lim, who by that time, was also standing at the windows on her side of the attorney’s room. “See, it’s happening now,” he said.

Brown then said he looked back out the windows in time to see Parker stumbling forward, then falling to the ground between the two deputies, his hands out in front of him. However, according to Brown, when Parker hit the ground, he stopped moving. “He looked like he was knocked out,” said Brown. “He appeared limp.” The fall brought Parker right up to the door nearest to where Brown was standing.
It was at that point that Brown got an angle on the deputies, whom he identified as Hirsch and Ochoa, both officers who had worked on the module. To his surprise, both deputies began punching the prone and unmoving Parker, according to Brown. Then one of the deputies, whose name Brown happened to know, Hirsch, began “kneeing” Parker. Finally, the other deputy—Deputy Ochoa— got out a taser gun and, according to Brown, tased Parker first in the leg several times, then in his back.

Brown saw Parker’s body convulse each time he was tased, he said, but otherwise the man with the deputies appeared to be out cold.

Like Lim, Brown said that Deputy Hirsch kept yelling “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!” even though Parker was in no condition to resist anything, according to Brown.

At this point, said Brown, Deputy Ochoa pointed a finger at him and yelled, “Lay down on your stomach and face the fucking wall.”

Brown scurried back to the cubicle and did what he was told to do. He laid down on the floor—which is where Esther Lim found him when she went back to the cubicle before leaving the building.

After Lim was gone, more deputies came into the attorneys’ room and into the staging area. Someone took pictures. A jail trustee arrived with a mop to swab down the floor where Parker had been lying and, according to Brown, had bled some on to the ground.

A sergeant asked Brown what had happened. Brown said he told him what he had witnessed. But while he talked, Deputy Ochoa appeared nearby and give him a hard look, said Brown what he took to be a threat, The sergeant escorted Ochoa away then left to get a video camera, at which point Brown spoke to Deputy Ryan Hirsch, the second of the deputies who had allegedly beat James Parker, who complained that he had injured his hand.

Brown said he told Hirsch that “a lady from the ACLU was here and saw what happened.”

“My advice is to stay out of it,” Hirsch said, according to Brown. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Brown did, however, give a statement on video about the incident. That much was verified by Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Steve Whitmore.

Brown also detailed the sequence of events in a signed declaration for the ACLU, in which Brown said he was interviewed on video by a second sergeant named Ramos who, he said, told him several times that he didn’t have to give a statement if he feared for his safety—or words to that affect.

“I felt very intimidated by this comment,” said Brown, “like he was trying to discourage me from saying anything.”

According to Brown, the same sergeant told him that he looked uncomfortable. “It looks like you don’t want to say anything.” Again, he said, he felt intimidated and thought that Sergeant Ramos was suggesting that perhaps he should not talk about what he had seen.

Brown said he gave the statement anyway. “I thought, if someone had seem me being beat up by deputies like the way it happened to Parker, I’d want that person to stand up for me and tell what happened.”

Brown also told Sergeant Ramos about Esther Lim having witnessed the eventl. According to Brown Ramos said that he knew who Lim was and where she was from and that it would “not change” his report.

BACK AT THE ACLU OFFICE, Peter Eliasberg said he assumed that someone would also want to interview Esther Lim—the sole outside witness to the Twin Towers incident. But, according to Eliasberg, no one from the sheriff’s department attempted to contact Lim.

Lim, however, checked on Parker and learned that he had stitches in his face and bruising in his facial area and his ribs.

By the end of the week, criminal charges had been filed —against James Parker. He was charged with with a felony assault on an officer and obstructing an officer in his line of duty.

When asked why no one from LASD had interviewed Lim before filing charges against Paker, Steve Whitmore said that they had attempted to reach Lim. “And she could have called us. I mean if she was so concerned about Mr. Parker’s safety, why didn’t she immediately report what had happened to the Sheriff’s department.”

As for Brown’s account in the declaration?

“It’s a fabrication,” Whitmore said. Both Brown and Parker were interviewed on video. “And they both said nothing happened.”

When Eliasberg and Lim hear what Whitmore has said about the sheriffs trying unsuccessfully to contact Lim, they are emphatic. “That just isn’t true. No one has called us,” said Eliasberg.

As to why Lim didn’t reported the alleged beating to the sheriffs, she said it was simple.

“I was scared,” she said. “If you see two police officers beating up a man on the street, would you go flag down the nearest police car?”

I’ve read reports of this kind of thing,” said Lim. “But I’ve never seen deputies viciously beating up an inmate. Nothing compares to the brutality of seeing it in person. It was scary.”

ON FEBRUARY 3, JAMES PARKER WAS SET TO BE ARRAIGNED IN IN DEPT. 30 OF THE DOWNTOWN CRIMINAL COURT, but he didn’t show up. According to court records, he wouldn’t come out of his cell. The unofficial word is that he was too spooked. The court records show that the same thing happened on Feb 4.

On Monday February 7, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times  about the alleged beating and the fact that Lim had witnessed it. That same day, the ACLU filed an official complaint about the incident.

On Tuesday February 8, following the appearance of the Times’ story, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launched an internal criminal investigation into the alleged beating.

In the meantime, Parker is on what is called “keep-away” status, said Steve Whitmore, meaning he is separated from all other inmates and accompanied at all times by a sheriff’s department sergeant.

On Feb. 9, James Parker was again set to be arraigned. Again he refused to come out of his cell.

When he was once more not present in court on Feb. 10, Superior Court Judge Upinder S. Kalra got fed up and ordered the sheriff’s department to “extract” Parker from his cell and get him to court, “by all means necessary.”

On February 14, Valentines Day, he was a no show.

On February 15, extraction was presumably successful and James Parker was finally arraigned.

He pleaded not guilty to both felony counts

His preliminary hearing is set for February 28.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/aclu-witnesses-brutal-beating-los-angeles-county-jail-inmate-sheriff-s-deputies

A civilian monitor was visiting the jail on another matter on Jan. 24, when she saw two deputies punch and use a Taser on an inmate who lay unconscious. A department log confirms the incident but offers different details.

A civilian jail monitor said she witnessed two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies treat an inmate like "a punching bag," unjustifiably beating him as he lay unconscious for at least two minutes, according to a court declaration filed Monday by the ACLU.

The violent attack January 24 on James Parker, detained on a non-violent marijuana charge, was witnessed by ACLU/SC’s Esther Lim, who is assigned to monitor all county jails.

The representative for the civil liberties organization was at Twin Towers jail for an unrelated meeting with another inmate when, according to her declaration, she heard thuds from outside the room she was in. Through a window, she said, she saw two deputies punching, kicking and Tasering an inmate.

Esther Lim, the ACLU observer, said the inmate never resisted, and his body was limp "like he was a mannequin" throughout the assault. In an interview with The Times, Lim said the deputies did not realize she was watching until after the beating stopped. A declaration from another inmate supports her account.

An internal sheriff's log also appears to confirm the Jan. 24 incident, but offers a different narrative. The log states that the inmate punched a deputy and charged at him. When another deputy tried to help, the inmate punched him as well and remained combative until he was Tasered, according to the sheriff's log.

Lim called the deputies' account a fabrication, saying inmate James Parker was so still while being beaten that she worried he was dead. During the incident, she said the deputies monotonously repeated "stop resisting" and "stop fighting" as though they "were reading from a script."

Lim said the ACLU commonly receives complaints from inmates who say deputies beat them while repeating "stop resisting" commands, even when the inmates aren't resisting. Lim said she suspects the deputies involved in this incident recited the commands as a ruse to later justify their actions with the help of a jailhouse recording or other deputies who may have heard their commands.

A sheriff's spokesman said the matter is being investigated, though "initial findings" indicate the inmate was combative, and one of the deputies injured his hand and had swelling on his face.

Allegations of deputy brutality in county jails are common but hard to substantiate. Aside from other deputies, usually the only witnesses are inmates, whose accounts are inherently considered less credible, experts say. This incident offers an especially rare instance in which a third party was there to observe.

One of the deputies involved in the incident was identified in court records as Ryan Hirsch. The other was identified by the ACLU by his last name, Ochoa. Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore declined to confirm their names. Both, he said, declined requests from The Times for an interview. The deputies remain on active duty, Whitmore said.

Parker, 35, was charged Monday with felony counts of battery and resisting an officer in connection with the incident. According to Lim's account, Parker was lying on his stomach, looking "unconscious" or "even dead." Hirsch and Ochoa, she said, simultaneously punched him and kneed him. Parker, she said, never put up his hands to protect his head, which Lim took as a sign that he had lost consciousness.

The deputies Tasered Parker's leg up to four times, she said, and his torso up to three times. A minute into the beating, Ochoa motioned to the other deputy, bringing his index finger to his lips, Lim recalled. Hirsch yelled "stop resisting" and "stop fighting" just once more after Ochoa motioned, she said.

Soon after the incident, Ochoa looked at Lim through the window and signaled for her to move away from the window, she said.

During another visit the next day, she said, she recognized Ochoa and at one point noticed him "staring at me in an aggressive manner."

Parker received stitches to his face, pain in his ribs and a swollen cheek and eye, according to the ACLU.

"This makes me feel even more strongly that these kinds of incidents go on a lot," said Peter J. Eliasberg, managing attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "And every time we bring them to the Sheriff's Department, they consistently say, 'They're all false, they're all false, prisoners lie.' "

Whitmore said investigators will interview all the witnesses.

"It's rare that you have a civilian eyewitness, and what we don't understand is she never mentioned this to us," Whitmore said. "Why didn't she come forward? Why didn't she talk to us?"

Eliasberg said the ACLU did not notify the Sheriff's Department immediately because in the past officials there have been quick to deny any complaints.

A court declaration from the inmate who was meeting with Lim at the time of the incident also disputed the deputies' telling. Lim said inmate Christopher Brown had seen the altercation develop before she did. Brown said Parker was not resisting.

"I saw him stumbling forward, towards me, falling to the ground," Brown said in a court declaration. "He looked like he was knocked out." After the incident, Brown said, another inmate had to mop up what appeared to be blood.

Brown said he was interviewed by deputies about the incident afterward. He said Ochoa was present at first. "As I was telling the sergeant that I saw Deputy Ochoa punching Parker, Deputy Ochoa stared at me in an aggressive manner, so I asked him 'What?' He aggressively said 'What' back at me.' "

Michael Gennaco, who heads the Office of Independent Review, the department's official watchdog, said involved deputies should not be present during interviews. Whitmore said the deputy was not present and that Brown's allegation was a "fabrication."

After Ochoa was escorted away, Brown said, he saw the other involved deputy, Hirsch, who warned him not to get involved.

"My advice," he said the deputy told him, "is to stay out of it. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

Raymond Smoot

An inmate at an overcrowded and long-troubled jail died after a fight with guards. An attorney for his family said he was beaten and stomped to death in his cell.

Six guards were placed on leave Monday while state investigators look into Raymond Smoot’s death, which was ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner’s office.

He was out of his cell asking to talk to a guard supervisor about his medications. A diabetic with high blood pressure, Smoot had been without his medications.

A guard had trouble getting Smoot back in his cell Saturday night at the state-run Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center, and he called for backup, authorities said. A struggle broke out and 25 to 30 guards were involved, said Archer Blackwell, a spokesman for the guards union.

Smoot, 52, was injured and died at a hospital.

Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, declined to release details of the fight.

But Warren Brown, an attorney for Smoot’s family, said Smoot was “beaten and stomped while in his cell by a number of officers.”

“It’ll be clear that this institution is operating with an absence of rules and regulations on how to deal with these types of procedures,” Brown said.

The Baltimore branch of the NAACP will request an FBI investigation, the civil rights organization said in a news release issued late Monday.

‘Overwhelmed and broken’ 

Since 2002, 27 inmates have died at central booking, according to state Sen. Verna Jones, who called for a task force to investigate the jail, saying Smoot’s death “illustrates a system that is overwhelmed and broken.”

People arrested in Baltimore are brought to central booking to be identified, fingerprinted and photographed before they have court hearings.

Opened in 1995, central booking was designed to process up to 45,000 people a year. Last year, it processed about 100,000. Cells designed to hold five to eight people are frequently jammed with as many as 18. Some inmates nap under toilets. Sick people without medications get sicker, sometimes vomiting on others.

Last month, a judge ordered that all inmates held longer than 24 hours be set free.

Smoot had been in central booking since May 4 on a theft charge, awaiting trial in June. He was initially held on $5,000 bail, which was later reduced. His family said they had intended to bail him out on Monday.

Bruised, bloody 

Delvonna Smoot, Smoot’s niece, said she saw her uncle’s body and his face was bruised and bloody.

“The doctors said they’ve never seen another human being beat somebody as bad as they beat my uncle, never,” she said.

The incident is the latest problem for Maryland’s troubled prison system. An inmate died last year after a violent encounter with prison staff. Another was allegedly strangled in February on a prison bus, leading an inmate to be charged and prison officials to fire three officers and discipline two others.

Rekia Boyd family awarded $4.5 million settlement

The Chicago City Council Wednesday approved a $4.5 million settlement with the family of Rekia Boyd, an innocent by-stander who was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer.

Wednesday night the family is troubled that the officer is still with the department.

It will be a year ago next week that Rekia Boyd was shot in the head by off-duty Chicago detective Dante Servin.

The city acknowledges that Servin, seated in his car, fired five shots blindly over his shoulder at a man with whom he'd exchanged angry words.

That man was Antonio Cross who was on his cellphone when he was shot in the thumb. Another bullet struck 22-year-old Rekia as she turned to escape the gunfire. She died the next day.

"We didn't even get a damn I'm sorry yet. We're still waiting," said Boyd's brother, Martinez Sutton.

Rekia's Boyd's family will receive $4.5 million as part of a wrongful death settlement approved by the city council. But justice, they say, will not be served until and unless Detective Servin is criminally charged.

"Superintendent (Garry) McCarthy and State's Attorney (Anita) Alvarez should accelerate their investigation and bring charges," said Bishop Tavis Grant. "It's very clear this woman was murdered."

Detective Servin was placed on administrative duty after the shooting where he remains today.

The Independent Police Review Authority in November turned over its report on the shooting to the State's Attorney office where it currently remains.

"Before I knew it, he got his gun aimed at my head and started shooting," Antonio Cross said.

Though wounded, Cross was charged after the shooting with aggravated assault, detective Servin as the victim. Cross went to court Wednesday morning. Servin did not, and the charge against Cross was dismissed.

"This has been a farce all along," said Benjamin Starks, Cross' attorney. "They knew they were not going to go forward, but they kept up the charade."

After approving another multi-million dollar settlement involving police conduct, some council members wonder aloud about discipline.

"There are certain mistakes that people make and they do lose their jobs for them. There are consequences for those mistakes," said Alderman Howard Brookins.

The financial settlement in the Boyd death came quickly, but the possible criminal prosecution of a police officer is not moving at the same speed.

The State's Attorney's office says that its review is ongoing and beyond that no comment on when or whether charges may come.

Gus Rugley: Shot 36 times by SFPD, 6 in the head

His real name is Gustavus Rugley, but we called him Gus. 

Gus had been under surveillance that day from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. He left his house walking twice on foot before deciding to drive the third time.

Mr. Rugley was watched by over 20 officers — there was the gang task force, homicide, special units and tactical units. These are major players with M-16s and AR-15s — the heavy artillery. They carry 30- and 60-bullet clips in their guns.

They were on a mission that day, and Gus was just a suspect. He was never once questioned, apprehended, asked to come to the station. 

A young man, unarmed, no drugs in his system, shot 36 times, six times in the head, by the SFPD.

But those of you who live in the city know that (the intersection at) Alemany Boulevard and Ocean Avenue, at 6:30 p.m., is congested with traffic both ways. There is no way that you could bob and weave in and out of cars there.

I want to touch on the end of the chase: Gus had given up. His hands were up in the air.

A witness, Anna Catreras, said Mr. Rugley sat in his truck and an officer in a light blue sweatshirt walked up, opened up the back passenger door of Gus’ vehicle and proceeded to unload her gun. Ms. Catreras’ later said that her statement was completely turned around in a July 2004 Chronicle story. She never said that Mr. Rugley was shooting back.

After he was shot, the command was given for Mr. Rugley to come out of the truck with his hands up. But he was dead.

The whole force shot at Gustavus Rugley. His right temple was struck, and his body on the whole right side had bullet holes.

This is an unjustified use of a firearm in the worst way. He was dead, and they all knew that.

What “brave” officer shot Gus at point blank range? He couldn’t have been afraid of Gus, or he wouldn’t be that close.

 And then do you know what they said? “He was shooting at us.”

The family got an autopsy nine and a half months later. It took them so long to give it to Ms. Pollard because they were hiding things. They knew public outcry was going to be so bad that we were going to tear the city up. But we’re not a family like that.

We just want to find out what really happened here, and we want justice. We want justice for Gus, who is no longer here.

It took nine and a half months to give my family the autopsy report. But, it took almost three weeks for them to release his body — that was another cover-up.

The autopsy report stated that there was no gunpowder residue on the fronts or the backs of this young man’s hands and none on his clothing. So who the hell was shooting at who?

I think that this is an injustice in the worse way. Gustavus had 36 bullets — not 32, not 31 — but 36 bullets in him, with six being in his head. He had a temple shot at close range and was shot from front to back, back to front, right to left and left to right.

That’s an execution! You shouldn’t be able to justify shooting someone like that.

They say during the chase Gus hit four of their police cars. Even I know that if you bump a police car, they’re going to shoot you dead on the first bump. We’re talking about four cars hit by the end of the chase — I don’t think so.

There was no airbag deployed, not in the police cars or in Gus’ truck. So that is another story that they webbed, and it’s another lie. Police will lie, lie, lie, lie. This is a web of lies.

We’re still finding out facts, and here’s another one: The young man that Gus is accused of killing — Gus didn’t kill him. And even the police knew Gus didn’t kill him. But they made him a suspect, got a $1 million warrant and came and hunted him down like a wild piece of meat.

When Mr. Rugley was walking on the streets, before he got to his truck, not one officer tried to apprehend him and say, “You’re under arrest.” They baited him to get him into his truck.

They were in unmarked cars — all the officers were in plain clothes. No lights, no sirens. Now what kind of high speed chase goes on with no lights and no sirens and at the end the suspect is dead? You tell me.