Two years after a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was caught on camera slamming a handcuffed inmate’s head into a concrete wall, prosecutors have decided not to charge either of the corrections officers involved.
The district attorney’s office explained the move in a memo last month, saying prosecutors couldn’t determine whether the force was intentional because one of the prosecutors argued that “the inmate’s head actually contacted the wall due to the inmate’s own momentum.”
The decision comes a year after the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California first made public the video of the incident at Men’s Central Jail. The group posted a 15-second clip of the incident online. The graphic security footage shows two officers chatting as a prisoner, both handcuffed, emerges from his cell. One of the officers then grabs the prisoner from behind and appears to slam him against a wall without any provocation. Photos of the injured man show a three-inch wound in his head.
This week, Peter Eliasberg, lead attorney for the ACLU, which is involved in two long-running class-action lawsuits against the jail, blasted the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute the sheriffs.
“This alone is nothing short of pathetic,” he told The Times, “but when you combine it with the DA’s history of codifying criminal activity by the sheriff’s office, it becomes outrageous.”
He said the ACLU plans to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to take up the case, noting that federal prosecutors have previously won convictions against other prison deputies whose cases local attorneys declined to prosecute.
In an email to The Times, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it “takes allegations of misconduct by jail officers extremely seriously” and that it reviews each case based on the evidence.
“Our office thoroughly reviewed the allegations in this case,” the email said, adding that prosecutors ultimately “concluded that the allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Friday that both deputies remain with the department. Now that the District Attorney’s Office has completed its investigation into the incident, the Sheriff’s Department will determine whether the deputies violated any rules or procedures.
“The agency expects custody officers to perform their duties in a professional manner, with integrity and compassion,” the statement said. “Anyone who fails to adhere to our standards of care or violates agency policies will be held accountable.”
The officers did not respond to emailed requests for comment, and it was not immediately clear whether they had lawyers.
The 2022 incident happened in the maximum security unit of Men’s Central Prison, where all inmates are handcuffed through a gap in the door before being allowed to leave their cells. Two officers escort inmates whenever they leave, and are “mandated to have a firm grip on the inmate.”
That same unit has since had other problems, according to ACLU lawyers: On Wednesday, The Times reported that guards had caught eight sheriff’s deputies watching “sexually explicit videos” instead of caring for suicidal inmates in a maximum-security unit.
One inspector described the room as “moldy” and damp, and said the men living there had no books or pens. “They have nothing and it’s pitch black,” Superintendent Haley Broder said in an interview. “I don’t know how you could survive 30 minutes in there.”
The inmate seen on the surveillance video, whose name has been withheld, was being held in a maximum security unit because he had previously threatened to stab sheriff’s deputies and had a “long history” of assaulting people, according to the district attorney’s memo.
According to the memo, on July 4, 2022, Sheriffs Jose Peralta and Jonathan Gutierrez approached the cell of an unidentified inmate and escorted him to a shower. After the deputies handcuffed the inmate and he emerged from his cell, the deputies said the inmate said, “Don’t touch me.”
There is no audio from the security camera, so it’s unclear what the three men said to each other, but Peralta claims the inmate threatened to headbutt Gutierrez, according to the district attorney’s memo.
In the memo, Gutierrez explained that the inmate made a “sudden movement” toward the shower as soon as he left his cell, surprising the deputy. Gutierrez responded by grabbing the inmate’s forearm and reaching for his shoulder. The inmate then “jumped forward with his upper body,” he alleges.
Gutierrez said everything happened so fast that he was just focused on controlling the inmate. According to the memo, Deputy Gutierrez said his right hand “got behind the inmate’s head” as the inmate moved forward.
“His head contacted the wall due to his own momentum,” Gutierrez wrote in a use-of-force report cited by prosecutors in their memo.
Eliasberg called the explanation “demonstrably false.”
When investigators interviewed the inmate a few hours after the incident, the inmate also seemed to dispute the officers’ account, saying he never mentioned the headbutt threat but that he had been threatened before.
“I was trying to get out and an officer pulled me and I moved forward and the officer hit me in the forehead,” he said, according to the note. “That’s all I remember because the officer told me yesterday that he would arrest me if he let me out of the cell.”
He continued to tell investigators he was taking psychiatric medication and believed he had telepathic powers, according to the memo, before agents cut him off during questioning after he digressed.
According to the memo, the deputies did not voluntarily make statements to investigators, but they did prepare use-of-force reports that prosecutors analyzed in their evaluation of the incident.
Prosecutors have said that to prove the officers committed a crime, they must show the force was intentional, unlawful and “not in self-defense.” But the video appears to support that the inmate made a “sudden movement” and “began to move his body toward the wall before Gutierrez grabbed him by the back of his neck,” they said.
“The video footage does not allow us to determine whether Gutierrez intentionally slammed the inmate into the wall or whether it was accidental,” prosecutors continued, concluding there was insufficient evidence to move forward with the case.
Colleen Kendrick, another ACLU attorney involved in the prison lawsuit, called that reasoning “implausible” and said it should be up to a jury to decide whether the slamming was intentional.
“Whether the officer intentionally slammed the man’s head into the wall, or whether, as they allege, the man’s head somehow slammed into the wall, is something that’s for a jury to decide,” she said. “I’m really surprised that they think no crime was committed here. If someone serving time slammed an officer’s head into a wall and caused those kinds of injuries, I can’t imagine the DA’s office would decline to prosecute.”
Nearly a decade ago, the ACLU made similar claims in a scathing letter to then-District Attorney Jackie Lacey in July 2015. The letter focused on local prosecutors’ failure to prosecute a group of deputies who beat and pepper-sprayed visitors who they said had attacked them in 2011.
County prosecutors initially charged the visitor, Gabriel Carrillo, with assaulting police officers and other charges, but said there was “no evidence that the officers acted inappropriately.”
After the U.S. Attorney’s Office took over the case, federal prosecutors won convictions against five deputies, two of whom admitted in court that Carillo had in fact been handcuffed during the raid. Carillo eventually sued and the case was settled for $1.2 million.
The ACLU letter said the Carrillo case was part of a larger pattern: District attorneys’ offices quickly charged inmates, often without reviewing video evidence, but “rarely” charged sheriff’s deputies, the civil rights group said.
Eliasberg said this week that little has changed.
“This is just further evidence of the District Attorney’s unwillingness to hold law enforcement accountable for criminal conduct,” he said. “The ACLU will swiftly call on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute this case, just as it did in 2011 and 2012.”
The Sheriff’s Department is currently subject to several consent decrees stemming from federal lawsuits. One of those, known as Rosas v. Luna, began in 2012. At the time, inmates alleged that “humiliating, cruel and sadistic attacks on inmates by sheriff’s deputies” had become commonplace. The suit claimed that many of the assaults by deputies were “far worse than the infamous beating of Rodney King in 1991.”
After a three-year legal battle, in 2015, inmates represented by the ACLU and the county reached an agreement on specific reforms the Sheriff’s Department would make to reduce the number of assaults in the jail.
Nearly a decade later, there have been signs of improvement: Guards are hitting inmates in the face much less frequently than they once did, according to county data. But the Department of Corrections has still not complied with all of the terms of the agreement, and the lawsuit remains ongoing.