SIX white Mississippi police officers have pleaded guilty to state charges for torturing two black men in a racist assault in the United States.
All six had also recently admitted their guilt in a connected federal civil rights case. They appeared in a Rankin County courtroom in Brandon, Mississippi, on Monday.
The men include five former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies – Brett McAlpin, Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke – and a former police officer from the city of Richland, Joshua Hartfield. Some of them nicknamed themselves the ‘Goon Squad’.
In their crimes, federal prosecutors saw echoes of the racist violence committed against civil rights activists in 1964. Locally, Sheriff Bryan Bailey called it the worst case of police brutality he had ever seen.
In January, the officers entered a house without a warrant and handcuffed and assaulted the two men with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects.
The officers mocked the two men with racial slurs in a 90-minute torture session, then devised a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun, leading to false charges that stood against the victims for months.
Their conspiracy unravelled after one of the officers told the sheriff he had lied, leading to confessions from the others. The charges against the victims were not dropped until June, after federal and state investigators got involved, according to their lawyer.
All six law enforcement officers agreed to sentences recommended by state prosecutors ranging from five to 30 years, although the judge is not bound by those suggestions. Time served for the state convictions will run concurrently with the potentially-longer federal sentences they may receive in November.
The victims – Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker – arrived together to Monday’s hearing and sat in the front row, just feet from their attackers’ families. They were embraced by Monica Lee, the mother of Damien Cameron, a black man who died in Elward’s custody in 2021.
‘I enjoyed the view of seeing the walk of shame. Head down, the disgust everybody felt for them and that they feel for themselves,’ Parker said after the officers were led away in shackles. ‘I hope this is a lesson to everybody out there: Justice will be served.’
The charges followed an investigation in March that linked some of the officers to at least four violent encounters since 2019, which left two black men dead.
All six of the former officers pleaded guilty to state charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to hinder prosecution.
Dedmon and Elward, who kicked in a door, also admitted to home invasion.
Elward pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for shoving a gun into Jenkins’s mouth and pulling the trigger, releasing a bullet that lacerated his tongue, shattered his jaw and exited through his neck.
Authorities described the incident as a ‘mock execution’ gone awry.
After details of the case became public, some residents pointed to a police culture they said gives officers carte blanche to abuse their power.
Jenkins and Parker were targeted because a white neighbour complained that two black men were staying at the home with a white woman, court documents show.
Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who was in hospital at the time. She has been paralysed since she was 15 and Parker was helping care for her.
‘He’s a blessing. Every time I’ve needed him he’s been here,’ Walley said in a February interview. ‘There were times I’ve been living here by myself and I didn’t know what I was going to do.’
Jenkins still has difficulty speaking because of his injuries. He can only eat soft foods easily and has recurrent nightmares.
‘As far as justice, I knew we were going to get it,’ Jenkins said. ‘But I thought it was maybe going to take longer.’
Other consequences remain to be determined. Elward and other deputies continue to face other probes and allegations of abuse.
‘I believe today’s guilty pleas show the community that our system of checks and balances is effective,’ Bailey said in a statement after the hearing.
Court documents unsealed by federal prosecutors suggest only some members of the ‘Goon Squad’ participated in the illegal raid. There are other Rankin County deputies ‘known to the United States Attorney’, the documents say.
‘We would certainly hope that they continue to investigate the Goon Squad and other outstanding claims that may exist against these officers, as well as other officers,’ said Trent Walker, a lawyer for Jenkins and Parker.
Kennedy confirms US has biolabs in Ukraine
AMERICAN politician Robert Kennedy Jr. has confirmed the existence of American biological laboratories in Ukraine which are being used to produce banned biological weapons.
‘We have bio-labs in Ukraine because we are developing bioweapons,’ the Democratic Party presidential candidate told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a video interview posted on the X social network (formerly known as Twitter) on Tuesday.
‘Those bioweapons are using all kinds of new synthetic biology and CRISPR (an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats in DNA) technology and genetic engineering techniques that were not available to a previous generation,’ the US politician, also known by his initials RFK Jr., said in the interview.
‘When the Patriot Act reopened the biolabs arms race in 2001, the Pentagon began putting a lot of money into bioweapons,’ Kennedy Jr. added.
‘But they were nervous at that time because if you violate the Geneva Convention, it’s a hanging offence.
‘So they were nervous about actually going full force into bioweapons development. So they transferred the authority for biosecurity to one agency in the HHS (the US Department of Health and Human Services).
Kennedy went on: ‘But now, when you do bioweapons development, every bioweapon, it needs vaccine so you develop them side by side because in 100 percent of the cases when you deploy a bioweapon, there’s blowback. Your side also gets sick,’ he concluded.
The Russian Defence Ministry exposed the existence of US military biolabs in Ukraine which are working on producing bioweapons as early as February 2022.
In mid-April, a Russian parliamentary commission presented its final report on the investigations into these US-run bio-labs which concluded that the Pentagon’s military biological programme is largescale, and is being carried out under the guise of ‘anti-terrorist’ projects permitted by the Biological Weapons Convention.
The parliamentary commission also pointed out that the activities of all the US-controlled laboratories involved Pentagon experts.
However, the results of their work were confidential, and government agencies in the host countries only had access to secondary research results.
Last year, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassiliy Nebenzia, revealed that these secret US-run labs were indeed producing biological weapons and asked the United Nations Security Council to establish a commission to investigate the reports that Washington and Kiev were in violation of the Convention.
Moscow believes that these US bio-labs in Ukraine are only a fraction of a global network of 300 similar facilities.
However, the US government denies the existence of such military bio-labs, but it has admitted to what it calls ‘US-funded biological research facilities’.
Earlier this year, Russia said it had obtained documents in Lisichansk, in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), that revealed the US military-funded labs in Ukraine had been creating biological weapons components and testing them on the population of the country.
‘Russian troops have secured over 20,000 documents, reference and analytical materials, and interviewed eyewitnesses and participants in American military-biological programmes’ since the start of the war in February last year’, said the commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence Forces, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov.
The general said that the documents ‘confirm… the focus of the Pentagon on creating biological weapons components and testing them on the population of Ukraine and other states along (Russia’s) borders.’
