A brutal beating by deputies was caught on tape. They were cleared anyway

Mansfield, La. – The strip search only lasted six minutes, but in the end, Jarius Brown had a broken nose, a fractured eye socket and a badly swollen face.

Never published images show why: two deputies of the sheriff of Louisiana struck the 25 -year -old naked player, throwing him around the laundry room of the Desoto detention center while landing a wave of 50 punches.

The day after the 2019 assault, one of the deputies resigned and the other was suspended. Internal files show that the Sheriff’s office concluded “there was no way to defend” the actions of the deputies.

However, this is exactly what the police of the state of Louisiana did, an Associated Press investigation found. After waiting for months to analyze the graphic video and more than a year to the same interviewer Brown, the agency has erased the deputies from the reprehensible acts. State police finally supported the statements of the deputies according to which Brown had been “the aggressor” in an altercation which took place after being arrested for stealing a car.

The case could have ended there if the federal prosecutors had not been involved and reached the opposite conclusion: Brown had been the victim of excessive force.

The graphic images remained under the Wraps for six years, but emerged this month in the longtime trial of Brown, asking for damages for his injuries. Brown, now 32, refused to comment on his lawyers.

Gary Evans, a former district prosecutor of the parish of Desoto, said that the case underlines the safety net that the Ministry of Justice has long provided in small communities – a role that many defenders fear that the ministry wrote its application of civil rights in the middle of the mandate of President Donald to “unleash” the police.

“It was a great miscarriage of justice at the state level, and it shows that the system has broken down and does not protect citizens,” said Evans. “In a community like this, the federal government is the only avenue for everything to be done.”

Brown blows were just the last in a litany of cases of police misconduct in the parish of Desoto, a rural strip of pine wood and hilly agricultural land south of Shreveport, in Louisiana.

A month before Brown was struck, another deputy was accused of embezzlement after tackling and hitting a man entering a grocery store several times. He accepted a permanent ban on the police in exchange for the charges rejected. In another case, a deputy for the parish of Desoto was accused of rape in the third degree after ordering a woman whom he arrested to make her oral sex.

Russell Graham, a state police spokesman, refused to explain the conclusion of his agency that there was no sufficient evidence “that the deputies in the case of Brown committed a crime. He attributed delays in the investigation to the Pandemic Covid-19, who began six months after the blows.

“LSP remains determined to investigate in-depth and impartial and to work with partners to ensure responsibility and respect the confidence of the public,” wrote Graham in an E-mail at AP, adding that the agency had “conducted an in-depth investigation on this subject when it was presented to them”.

Former deputy Javarrea Pouncy pleaded guilty to the consumption of excessive force and was sentenced last year to serve about three years in federal prison. He could not be joined to comment.

The other deputy, Demarkes Grant, who pleaded guilty of having hindered justice, was released from prison in April after serving a 10 -month sentence. Grant told AP that he was still “stressed” and had “lost a lot” as a result of his conviction. He refused to say if he regretted the blows.

“What happened has happened,” he said.

The use of force experts questioned the divergent results at the level of the state and the federal government, saying that Brown had never formed a threat and that the blows were excessive.

The grainy images show a handcuffed brown by calmly walking in the prison laundry room before undressing. The blows start halfway, after the deputies faced Brown so as not to squat as indicated so that they can search it completely.

None of the deputies asked for medical care for Brown after the blows, but the director admitted that the man needed attention and made sure that he had been taken to the hospital.

“I do not know how an objective assessor of this incident could determine that it was anything but excessive,” said Charles “Joe” Key, a former Baltimore police lieutenant who generally testifies to defend the police and examined the images at the request of the AP.

Andrew Scott, former Boca Raton police chief in Florida, said that there was nothing on the video that would have justified the blows. He could only assume that the deputies “provided reprisals”. Any police officer who justified the blows after watching the video, added Scott, is “not a competent or truthful expert”.

A few days after the blows, the sheriff of the parish of Desoto, Jayson Richardson, suspended Grant and aroused the resignation of Pouncy. He defended the state police investigation in a recent interview, saying that federal and state criticisms were not a comparison of “apple apples” due to different criminal statutes.

Evans, the former district prosecutor, said local officials had thwarted his efforts to get the video.

Police from the state of Louisiana finally provided the threshing video to the successor of Evans, Charles Adams, who closed the investigation in 2021. No matter what the video shows, Adams told AP, the report of the State police would have made a lawsuit “very difficult, if not impossible” because he concluded that there was not enough evidence of a crime.

“This report would have been published and beaten above our head,” said Adams.

The state police report describes Brown as the attacker and said that the man told soldiers that he was “probably high” when he was attacked, but the police had taken “appropriate measures” against him.

State investigators also concluded that the images supported the accounts of the deputies’ attack. The United States Ministry of Justice, however, charged the two deputies to falsify their reports, which Grant admitted to having been manufactured to create a “false story”.

A few weeks after the September 2019 beat in prison, Brown pleaded guilty to “the unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars. State police interviewed Brown in prison in early 2021 and reported that he “did not want to do anything” about blows and “was not interested in continuing the criminal or civil affair”.

A local judge, Amy McCartney, rejected the trial that Brown brought against the deputies, judging in 2023, the blows did not constitute a “crime of violence”. A court of appeal canceled this decision, and Brown lawyers request damages for its injuries and medical expenses.

“Jarius Brown has survived a horrible and not caused blow,” said Brown lawyer Michael Imboscio, adding that he was “entitled to justice”. Brown is also represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, who fought a long legal battle linked to the state’s limitation period on civil complaints resulting from police violence.

Brown’s father, Derek Washington, said the attack had sent an already unstable mental capacity of his son “in a more serious case of schizophrenia and anxiety”. Today, Brown is afraid of crowds and closed spaces, he said, and “cannot work in society”.

“He always thinks that someone is trying to do him physically,” said Washington. “Right now, my son is just a stranger, and I just want to recover a semblance of him.”

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Brook reported to New Orleans.

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Contact the Global Investigation Team at Investigation@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/