(Washington) A former Mississippi police officer convicted of torturing two African-Americans with several of his white colleagues was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison.
This police officer, Hunter Elward, and five of his colleagues from this southern state admitted in August to having tortured their two victims for two hours with a dildo, tasers and a sword, Elward going so far as to shoot the victim in the mouth. one of them.
Hunter Elward, 31, was sentenced to 241 months in prison and Jeffrey Middleton, 46, to 17 and a half years.
The four other defendants will be served their sentences on Wednesday and Thursday.
“The Department of Justice will hold accountable officers who violate constitutional rights and thus betray the public’s trust,” Secretary Merrick Garland responded in a statement.
In January 2023, these six police officers belonging to a team renowned for its brutality entered “without warrant or justification” into a house in Braxton, a small town in Mississippi, where suspicious activity had been reported to them, according to court documents.
Finding two black men there, they handcuffed them and uttered “racial insults”.
According to the prosecution, they sexually assaulted their two victims with a dildo and inflicted 17 electric shocks on them with their tasers. They also humiliated them by forcing them to swallow alcohol, cooking oil, milk and other liquids.
This ordeal, which lasted approximately two hours, culminated when Hunter Elward put his service weapon in the mouth of one of the two men. To scare him, he first pulled the trigger after removing a bullet from the magazine. During a second attempt, however, the bullet went away and broke the victim’s jaw before exiting through the back of his neck, according to the prosecution file.
The police then left their victims in a pool of blood for many minutes, while they worked together to cover up this blunder.
The team destroyed the home’s video surveillance, one of the shell casings used and attempted to burn the victims’ clothes to make the evidence disappear, according to the prosecution.
The officers also placed a pellet gun on one of the victims and methamphetamine at the scene to justify their entry into the house after the fact.
They then wrote false reports and repeatedly lied to investigators.