One of the Mississippi “Goon Squad” officers who are responsible for the racist attack and torture of two Black men is attempting to have his sentence reduced.
In April 2024, former Mississippi Sheriff Brett McAlpin was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison, the second-longest out of the six officers who pleaded guilty to the torture of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker.
Reportedly, Alpin was told that Black was living with a white woman. That is when he and his fellow “Goon Squad” members entered the home without a warrant and proceeded to attack the pair of Black men. They reportedly waterboarded them, tased them, made them strip naked, and attempted to assault them sexually.
In arguments filed last week, Theodore Cooperstein, McAlpin’s attorney, said that his client’s sentence was “unreasonable” because he was waiting in a truck while other officers were the ones assaulting Jenkins and Parker, according to the Associated Press.
Cooperstein wrote, “Brett was drawn into the scene as events unfolded and went out of control, but he maintained a peripheral distance as the other officers acted. Although Brett failed to stop things he saw and knew were wrong, he did not order, initiate, or partake in violent abuse of the two victims.”
More from the Associated Press:
Cooperstein is asking the appeals court to toss out McAlpin’s sentence and order a district judge to set a shorter one. Cooperstein wrote that “the collective weight of all the bad deeds of the night piled up in the memory and impressions of the court and the public, so that Brett McAlpin, sentenced last, bore the brunt of all that others had done.”
The other five officers who pleaded guilty to the assault of Jenkins and Parker were Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton, Daniel Opdyke, and Joshua Hartfield.
Elward was sentenced to 45 years, Dedemon to 25 years, Middleton and Opdyke to 20 years, and Hartfield, the only attacker not part of the “Goon Squad” or the Rankin County sheriff’s department, received 15 years.
Just this past June, the text messages of the “Goon Squad” were revealed to the public, showing multiple inappropriate and disgusting conversations between a plethora of officers at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office dating back to 2019.
The messages included banter about using excessive force against crime suspects, tasing people in the anus, and talking about taking nude photos of female suspects.