Two more Mississippi lawmakers are scheduled to be sentenced today for torturing and sexually abusing black men

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – The execution continues Wednesday within the case of a white former law enforcement officer in Mississippi who pleaded guilty last 12 months to breaking right into a home with no warrant and torturing two black men with a stun gun, a sex toy and other objects.

Daniel Opdyke, 28, and Christian Dedmon, 29, will appear individually before U.S. District Judge Tom Lee. They face long prison sentences.

On Tuesday, Lee sentenced 31-year-old Hunter Elward and 46-year-old Jeffrey Middleton to nearly 20 years in prison. Like Opdyke and Dedmon, they were working as Rankin County sheriff’s deputies on the time of the attack.

Another former police deputy, Brett McAlpin, 53, and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield, 32, will go on trial Thursday.

Former officers admitted several months ago that they tortured Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. Elward admitted to putting a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and firing a shot as a part of a “mock execution” that went unsuitable.

In a press release Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland condemned the “heinous attack on the citizens they were sworn to protect.”

Before Lee sentenced Elward and Middleton, he called their actions “outrageous and despicable.”

The terror began on January 24, 2023, with a racist incitement to extrajudicial violence, when a white Rankin County resident complained to McAlpin that two black men were staying with a white woman in a house in Braxton. McAlpin told Dedmon, who texted a bunch of white deputies who were so willing to use excessive force that they called themselves “The Goon Squad.”

Once inside, they handcuffed Jenkins and his friend Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup of their faces. They forced them to strip naked and take a shower together to hide the mess. They taunted the victims with racist insults and shocked them with stun guns. Dedmon attacked them with a sex toy.

After Elward shot Jenkins within the mouth, they hatched a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun. For months, false allegations were made against Jenkins and Parker. Jenkins suffered a lacerated tongue and a broken jaw.

Majority-white Rankin County lies east of the state capital, Jackson, and is home to one in all the best percentages of black residents of any major U.S. city.

Officers warned Jenkins and Parker to “stay out of Rankin County and return to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River,” court documents say, referring to an area with the next concentration of black residents.

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Dedmon can be scheduled to be sentenced for his leading role within the assault on a white man that occurred before Jenkins and Parker were tortured. On Tuesday, prosecutors identified the victim for the primary time as Alan Schmidt and reviewed his statement, which detailed what happened to him on December 4, 2022.

Schmidt said that in a traffic stop that night, Rankin County deputies charged him with possession of stolen property. They handcuffed him, dragged him out of the vehicle and beat him until he “started seeing spots.” The statement said Dedmon fired a gun into the air and forced Schmidt to his knees.

Dedmon put a gun to Schmidt’s temple and tried to put his genitals in the person’s mouth as Elward watched, and Dedmon grabbed Schmidt’s genitals through the ordeal as the person screamed, Schmidt said. The attack didn’t stop until officers took Schmidt to jail.

“What form of sick person does that? He already has a lot power over us that if he behaves like this, he must really have a extremely sick mind,” Schmidt wrote in his statement.

Last March, months before federal prosecutors announced charges in August, an Associated Press investigation linked some deputies to at the least 4 violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two people dead and one with everlasting injuries. damage.

Elward and Middlelton apologized in court with emotion. Elward’s attorney, Joe Hollomon, said his client first witnessed Rankin County deputies turning a blind eye to misconduct in 2017.

“Hunter (Elward) was privy to the culture of corruption within the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office,” Hollomon said.

For months, Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey, whose deputies committed the crimes, said little concerning the incident. After the officers pleaded guilty in August, Bailey said the officers had acted unfairly and promised to change the department. Jenkins and Parker called for his resignation and filed a $400 million civil lawsuit against the department.