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Earlier this year, six Braxton, Mississippi, police officers entered the home of two Black men without a warrant and proceeded to handcuff and torture the two men using sex toys, stun guns, and regular guns, which one cop used to shoot one of the men in the mouth, ripping off his tongue.
Source: Douglas Rissing / Getty
Now all of the involved officers; Brett McAlpin, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton, Daniel Opdyke of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, and Joshua Hartfield, a Richland police officer, have pleaded guilty to federal charges including conspiracy against rights, obstructions of justice, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm under a crime of violence, and conspiracy to obstruct justice after they brutalized, tortured and sexually assaulted Michael Corey Jenkins, the shooting victim, and Eddie Terrell Parker.
On Monday, the group also pleaded guilty to state charges.
The Associated Press reports that all six who mocked their victims with racial slurs faced a charge of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice, four with obstruction of justice in the first degree, two were charged with home invasion, and one with aggravated assault.
If the state of Mississippi is looking to shed its reputation as one of the most racist, Jim Crow-adherent states in America, legal officials might want to start by ensuring that every single cop involved gets the maximum penalty allowed under the law for their participation in what sounds like a prelude to a reconstruction-era race massacre or an alternate ending to an Emmett Till-like story in which the victims survive.
AP notes that each officer agreed to sentences recommended by state prosecutors ranging from five to 30 years, although the judge isn’t bound by that, and time served for the state charges will run concurrently with federal sentences they are scheduled to receive.
The federal sentences they’ll receive in November could be much longer.
According to AP, the whole thing started after a white neighbor called McAlpin, a Rankin County deputy, and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman, to which McAlpin reportedly responded by relaying the info to Deputy Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies who called themselves “The Goon Squad” and asked the deputies, “Are y’all available for a mission?”
Nah—either put all of these KKKops under the jail, or Mississippi stays on the white supremacist map where it historically belongs.
Also, f**k 12.
