New Lawsuit Filed Against 'Goon Squad' Mississippi Deputies

In January 2023,  six Braxton, Mississippi, police officers entered the home of two Black men without a warrant after a white neighbor called one of them and complained that the two men were staying with a white woman. Those six now-former officers — Brett McAlpin, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton, Daniel Opdyke, and Joshua Hartfield — who called themselves “The Goon Squad,” pleaded guilty to crimes that included the brutalization, torture, and sexual assault of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker.

Well, according to a recent lawsuit filed by another alleged victim, that lynch-happy event in early 2023 was not the Goon Squad’s first rodeo.

According to Mississippi Today, last week, Alan Schmidt, the plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, who is notably white, claimed Dedmon, Edward, and Opdyke beat and sexually assaulted him in late 2022. Neither of the three officers denied that the beating took place.

From Mississippi Today:

In December 2022, deputies pulled Schmidt from his car and beat him while he was handcuffed, the lawsuit alleges. One deputy pressed his arm into an anthill, and former narcotics investigator Christian Dedmon fired a gun near Schmidt’s head while interrogating him about the location of stolen tools he believed Schmidt had taken. 

Dedmon punched Schmidt and shocked him several times with Deputy Hunter Elward’s Taser, then pulled out his own genitals and attempted to rub them in Schmidt’s face, the lawsuit claims.

Dedmon pleaded guilty to violating Schimdt’s constitutional rights, but has since denied the sexual assault. Former deputies Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke pleaded guilty to failing to stop the beating, according to court documents.  

According to the suit, which seeks an unspecified amount of compensation for his pain and suffering, Schmidt isn’t only suing on his own behalf; he filed the suit on behalf of everyone who has been abused by the sheriff’s department, which Schmidt alleges is “responsible for a pattern of misconduct by deputies and jail guards, listing several other lawsuits against deputies and county jail guards,” Mississippi Today reported.

“There are many things that go on in this county that have gone on for many years,” Schmidt said. “I want justice for everyone that has been wronged.”

In fact, in 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office over a pattern of allegations of abuse and civil rights violations, and the investigation is still ongoing, despite the Trump administration closing investigations into law enforcement agencies across the country earlier this year.

In 2023, an investigative report by Mississippi Today and the New York Times found that Rankin County deputies had been torturing people they suspected of using drugs for nearly two decades. In February of this year, Dedmon himself admitted publicly that the abuses he participated in were part of a widespread practice at the department, and that deputies routinely entered homes without warrants or probable cause, and beat and humiliated people for information, and for intimidation. A more recent investigation by both publications found that for years, Rankin County jail guards and administrators brutalized the inmates in their care, and enlisted and incentivized other inmates to help them do it.

“The case puts the lie to any claim that what happened to Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker was isolated,” Schmidt’s attorney, Trent Walker, said of his client’s lawsuit in a statement. “ I want the citizens of Rankin County, specifically, to be able to look at this case and the other cases and say that it’s enough, it’s time for a fresh start.”

Of course, in the case of Jenkins and Parker, deputies weren’t after information about drug trafficking or any other crimes. Those two Black men were simply victims of cops who came to live out their lynching fantasies in the state that beat, tortured, and killed  Emmett Till.

What’s that they say about “the more things change”?

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