As a weeklong civil-rights trial for two former youth lockup officers continued Friday, one of them told jurors that the force used on youths in a Batesville facility in 2012 and 2013 was both appropriate and necessary.
Will Ray, 27, began testifying shortly after federal prosecutors finished presenting four days of testimony in an effort to show that Ray and Thomas Farris, 48, participated in the unnecessary pepper-spraying of youths for minor infractions, in violation of the teenagers' civil rights, and then falsely reported that the youths were violent or out of control.
Another former jailer, Jason Benton, and the jailers' supervisors, Lt. Dennis Fuller and Capt. Peggy Kendrick, who ran the White River Regional Juvenile Detention Facility, have admitted depriving the detainees of their civil rights and falsifying reports. Fuller testified earlier in the week against Ray and Farris.
The trial in U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson's Little Rock courtroom is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. Monday in front of jurors living in the Batesville Division of the Eastern District of Arkansas.
One of Ray's attorneys, Barrett Moore of Batesville, asked the former detention officer about a video he was shown shortly after he began working at the jail on May 11, 2012, just after turning 21. The dramatic video, which was played in the courtroom when jurors were gone, showed a recent stabbing of a female detention officer by an inmate who quickly overpowered her at the door to his cell. Ray said it was frightening and "definitely made me more aware ... of how quickly things can occur."
Making an even bigger impression, he testified, was seeing the aftermath of the suicide of a detainee who had used his bedding to hang himself. Ray said that the incident prompted jail officials to emphasize suicide prevention measures and install cameras in the cells that didn't have them, creating an atmosphere of no tolerance for any activity in which an inmate could injure himself or another.
Sheriff's Deputy Les McCollum testified earlier in the week that he taught jailers how and when to use force, such as pepper spray, stun guns and a restraint chair, using the standard curriculum for law enforcement officers across the state.
Jailers at the Batesville facility, he said, were instructed that "only the minimum amount of force necessary shall be used to control a juvenile," and that force could be used "only when necessary and never as punishment," and never in response to passive resistance, such as an inmate refusing to get up.
The county juvenile facility used a particularly potent form of pepper spray known as Top Cop, McCollum said.
Under cross-examination, McCollum acknowledged that he made clear to his trainees that "this is our policy. You need to go by the policy of the facility you're working at."
Against that backdrop, Ray testified that he was trained in the use of pepper spray not by McCollum but by another jailer. He said the juvenile jail's policy allowed jailers to use force only to prevent an inmate from hurting himself or others or from damaging property, or to enforce a lawful command, and prohibited its use for malicious or sadistic purposes.
He said a large sign that Kendrick placed where all jailers could see it every day declared, "The rules are simple: My Way," and he followed it closely.
Kendrick's rules, he said, required jailers to be on alert for any "erratic behavior" by detainees that the officers witnessed or were told had occurred during a previous shift.
Moore took Ray slowly through videos that prosecutors had shown to jurors, isolating frames so Ray could explain what was happening up close as jailers went into cells and pepper-sprayed detainees.
During the replaying of a Nov. 6, 2013, video in which Ray was seen grabbing a sleeping inmate and wrestling him away from a wall and toward a jar of pepper spray that Fuller held, Ray said the boy had been in the facility many times and "you never knew what [he] was going to do."
Night-shift jailers reported having problems with the inmate on Nov. 5, he said, and day-shift jailers, himself included, were made aware that the boy "had acquired part of a broomstick and inserted it into his rectum, and masturbated in front of the camera" in his cell.
Ray testified that in response, Kendrick ordered jailers to keep the inmate on suicide watch, which meant taking his bunk mat and covers away, and placing him in a "suicide gown" made of paper.
Ray said that's why he, Farris and Fuller entered the inmate's cell that day, with Fuller carrying pepper spray and Farris standing near the door with the gown.
Fuller testified earlier in the week that the men entered the cell for one reason: to pepper-spray the boy at Kendrick's command, without knowing details of what he had done, and then to "let him cook," or suffer, until allowing him to wash the spray off in the shower.
Moore advanced the frames of the video slowly, showing Fuller kicking the inmate's bunk to wake him, and then, after the inmate sits up, talking to him. Ray said Fuller was telling him they needed to take him out of his jumpsuit and put him in a suicide gown. The former jailer also noted that when he grabbed the inmate and turned him, Fuller hadn't yet pulled out his pepper-spray canister.
"If he had just gotten up and got in the suicide gown, he would not have been pepper-sprayed," Ray testified. But, he said, the prisoner's resistance constituted a failure to follow a lawful command and required a burst of pepper spray, administered by Fuller.
Ray said the reason jailers sometimes waited a couple of minutes before leading prisoners to the shower to wash off the chemical wasn't to make them suffer, but to "let the pepper spray take effect, to make sure you have compliance" with a command, such as sitting or standing.
A camera outside the cell showed Ray placing a blanket over the detainee's shoulders as he emerged from the shower, before he was taken back to his cell.
In another incident with the same boy a week later, Ray denied giving Fuller a "thumbs up" signal for pepper-spraying the boy. He said that when Fuller emerged from the boy's cell and said he was going to get soap for the boy's shower, "I said 'thumbs up,' I understood."
The videos have no sound.
Describing a pepper-spraying incident involving another youth on Nov. 21, 2013, Ray said the inmate had earlier made threats to use a shank to kill all the jailers. On this day, Ray said, the boy was removed from a classroom for slapping another detainee on the head. He then refused to let the jailers search him for a pencil that he could have taken from the classroom and used to stab the guards. Ray said detainees were routinely searched after they left the classroom to return to their cells.
He testified that Farris pepper-sprayed the boy in his cell for not complying with a command to sit down and be searched, which he still believes was a proper response.
As prosecutors began Ray's cross-examination, the former jailer acknowledged that a report Kendrick wrote after she pepper-sprayed a girl in his presence "is false." The report said the girl had moved toward Kendrick with fists clenched, but a replay of the video showed the girl was simply standing by her bunk, arms at her side, talking to another jailer, when Kendrick walked in and sprayed her in the face.
Ray told Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Harris that the reason the girl was sprayed was that she had been seen on camera "beating on the wall" in her cell, which he said could have hurt her hands and annoyed other prisoners.
The girl testified earlier in the week that she had been tapping out a musical rhythm with a prisoner on the other side of the wall. The video showed her smiling at the time.
Metro on 12/15/2018