(Washington) Four former Mississippi police officers were sentenced Wednesday and Thursday to 10 to 40 years in prison for torturing two African-Americans in January 2023.
The six white police officers from this southern state involved in this violence pleaded guilty last August. They admitted to torturing their two victims for two hours with a dildo, tasers and a sword, one of them even shooting one of them in the mouth.
This police officer was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison and another to 17 and a half years.
Two others, Christian Dedmon, 29, and Daniel Opdyke, 28, were sentenced Wednesday to 40 years and 17 and a half years in prison, respectively. The first received the heaviest sentence due to his involvement in the worst sexual torture.
Brett McAlpin, 53, and Joshua Hartfield, 32, were in turn sentenced Thursday to 27 and 10 years in prison respectively.
“The Department of Justice will hold accountable agents who violate constitutional rights and thus betray the trust of the population,” Minister Merrick Garland responded in a press release on Tuesday.
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 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 taser shocks on them. They also humiliated them by forcing them to swallow alcohol, cooking oil, milk and other liquids.
This ordeal culminated when one of the police officers 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 spent shell casings and attempted to burn the victims’ clothes to make the evidence disappear, according to the prosecution.
The police also placed a pellet gun on one of the victims and methamphetamine at the scene to subsequently justify their entry into the house.
They then wrote false reports and repeatedly lied to investigators.