Newly released video of a fatal New York prison beating shows correctional officers repeatedly pummelling a handcuffed man, striking him in the chest with a shoe, and lifting him by the neck and dropping him.
Body camera footage of the December 9 assault on Robert Brooks was made public Friday by the state’s attorney general, who is investigating the officers’ use of force.
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Brooks, 43, was pronounced dead at a hospital the morning after the assault at the Marcy Correctional Facility, a state prison where was incarcerated in Oneida County.
Thirteen correctional officers and a nurse implicated in the attack will face termination, according to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who said she was “outraged and horrified” by videos of the “senseless killing.”
The footage made public Friday shows correctional officers repeatedly punching Brooks in the face and groin as he sits handcuffed on a medical examination table.
As one of the officers uses a shoe to strike Brooks in the stomach, another yanks him up by his neck and drops him back on the table. The officers then remove the man’s shirt and pants as he lies motionless and bloodied on his back.
“These videos are shocking and disturbing and I advise all to take appropriate care before choosing to watch them,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said.
The final results of Brooks’ autopsy are still pending.
Preliminary findings from a medical examination indicate “concern for asphyxia due to compression of the neck as the cause of death, as well as the death being due to actions of another,” according to court filings.
The videos do not include audio because the body cameras had not been activated by the officers wearing them. The state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision issued a directive in the wake of Brooks’ death requiring that staff use body cameras in every staff interaction with incarcerated people.
James said her office was investigating the use of force that led to Brooks’ death, but did not say whether any of the officers would be charged with crimes.
With the release of the videos, “members of the public can now view for themselves the horrific and extreme nature of the deadly attack on Robert L Brooks,” a lawyer for his family, Elizabeth Mazur, said.
“As viewers can see, Mr Brooks was fatally, violently beaten by a group of officers whose job was to keep him safe,” Mazur said. “He deserved to live, and everyone else living in Marcy Correctional Facility deserves to know they do not have to live in fear of violence at the hands of prison staff.”
The union for state correctional officers, which viewed footage of the assault before its public release, said in a statement: “What we witnessed is incomprehensible to say the least and is certainly not reflective of the great work that the vast majority of our membership conducts every day.”
“This incident not only endangers our entire membership but undermines the integrity of our profession. We cannot and will not condone this behaviour,” said the union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association.
Brooks had been serving a 12-year prison sentence for first-degree assault since 2017. He had arrived at the Marcy Correctional Facility only hours before the beating, after being transferred from another nearby state prison, officials said.
Marcy is about 200 miles (323 kilometres) northwest of New York City, between the cities of Rome and Utica.
The Correctional Association of New York, a prison oversight group, said it had documented reports of pervasive brutality and racism inside the Marcy Correctional Facility during a monitoring visit two years ago.
The organization’s executive director, Jennifer Scaife, said the footage of Brooks being beaten “is sickening and appalling, but not surprising” given its previous findings. She called on the state prison system to “address the systemic issues that allow such brutality to flourish.”
Tina Luongo, a chief attorney at The Legal Aid Society in New York City, called for “complete transparency” on state correctional staff’s use of force and a “full accounting of this tragedy.”
“Like everyone who has seen this video, we are horrified, angered, and deeply saddened,” said Luongo, calling the assault on Brooks “a grotesque display of inhumanity that is utterly appalling.”
“Too often, the violence that occurs behind prison walls remains hidden or becomes normalized in the public eye once the headlines fade,” said Luongo, whose organization provides public defender services and has clients in state prisons.
David Condliffe, the executive director of the alternatives-to-incarceration nonprofit Center for Community Alternatives, said: “We don’t need to watch this footage to know what it reveals: generations of encouraged, calculated cruelty and abuse of power that fester and metastasize behind the blue wall of silence.”
“For every instance caught on camera, countless more acts of violence and murder in prisons are ignored, justified, or covered up,” Condliffe said in a statement. “Accountability must include, but cannot stop with, the firing of a few individuals. Their violence is not an anomaly; it is the product of a system steeped in impunity.”
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