Justice Department opens civil rights investigation into sheriff’s office after torture of two black men

JACKSON, Miss. — The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into a Mississippi sheriff 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 engaged in excessive use of force, unlawful stops, searches and arrests, and 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 assaulting Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker for hours. A sixth officer, from the Richland Police Department, was also convicted in the attack.

Some of the officers were part of a group so prone to excessive use of force that they called themselves the Goon Squad. All six were sentenced in March to 10 to 40 years in prison.

The charges follow an Associated Press investigation in March 2023 that linked some of the officers to at least four violent clashes since 2019 that left two Black men dead.

“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 reports of other disturbing incidents, including officers misusing stun guns, illegally entering homes, using “offensive racial slurs” and employing “dangerous and vicious 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, federal prosecutors say. A white person called Rep. Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a home in Braxton.

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

Residents saw the gruesome details of the case as a reminder of the racist atrocities committed by those in power in Mississippi. The difference this time is that those who abused their power paid a high price for their crimes, victims’ attorneys said.

Besides 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 close to the maximum limits set by 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, 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 critical first step in cleaning up the Sheriff’s Department and holding Rankin County legally accountable for years of constitutional violations against its citizens,” Shabazz and Walker said. “This all happened because, despite countless 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 United States to be investigated by the Justice Department since 2021, Clarke said.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee said text messages exchanged between members of the Goon Squad, including officers who were not present during the January 2023 assault, showed that the deputies “regularly discussed extreme and unnecessary uses of force and other means of dehumanizing Rankin County residents.” He said the deputies shared a video of an officer defecating in a resident’s home.

“In Mississippi and across the country, we have learned time and again that real change in civil rights sometimes requires digging up the past, telling painful stories and proposing new ways of doing things,” Gee said. “We intend to bring this investigation to Rankin County.”

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Associated Press reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report.