The last of the former Mississippi officers involved in the brutal “Goon Squad” case, which saw the torture of two Black men, received their federal court sentences on Thursday. With this, all six officers implicated in the horrifying incident have now been sentenced.
U.S. District Court Judge Tom Lee handed down a ten-year prison sentence to former officer Joshua Hartfield on Thursday afternoon. This sentencing follows Judge Lee’s decision to give former Rankin County sheriff’s deputy Brett McAlpin, the chief investigator and highest-ranking deputy present during the incident, a sentence of over 27 years.
McAlpin, Hartfield, and four other former officers all pleaded guilty last year to felony charges, including civil rights conspiracy, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence, after unlawfully busting the home of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker after a neighbor reported the men were staying with a white woman. While inside, the officers hurled racial slurs at the men, beat them, and assaulted them with sex toys, stun guns, and other objects for nearly two hours.
Hartfield was the sole officer involved in the violent raid who did not work for the sheriff’s department. In August, he pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the incident and state charges of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and first-degree obstruction of justice. He is currently awaiting sentencing for the state charge.
“You’re not here by accident,” US District Judge Tom Lee told Hartfield during his sentencing. “You made some choices. Some bad choices. But I do look at you (in) a different light, I suppose, compared to the other defendants. You were not a member of the ‘Goon Squad.’ You were not even a member of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.”Still, Lee told him, “didn’t just fail to intervene, you actively participated in a much more limited basis than your codefendants, but you participated, nonetheless. For that, you deserve to be punished.”
Earlier in the week, former “Goon Squad” officers Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, and Daniel Opdyke were sentenced. Dedmon received a 40-year sentence, Opdyke received 17½ years, Elward, who shot Jenkins, was sentenced to 20 years, and Middleton, considered the group’s ringleader, received a 17½-year prison sentence.
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