Ex-Deputy Describes Rampant Violence by Mississippi ‘Goon Squad'

New York Times

21-02-2025

In a series of interviews from prison, a former Mississippi sheriff's deputy described for the first time how he and others in his department regularly entered homes without warrants, beat people to get information and illegally seized evidence that helped convict people of drug crimes.
His statements corroborate many aspects of an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today that uncovered a two-decade reign of terror by Rankin County sheriff's deputies, including those who called themselves the 'Goon Squad.' They also shed new light on the deputies' tactics and the scope of their violent and illegal behavior.
The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who once led the department's narcotics division, told Mississippi Today in emails and phone calls that drug raids occurred in suburban Rankin County, outside Jackson, almost every week for years.
He said deputies regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects to get them to share information during the raids. And he said they often seized evidence without a legally required warrant, raising questions about possible wrongful convictions in hundreds of narcotics cases stemming from the raids.
For some raids, he said, the deputies would falsely describe emergency circumstances that gave them cover for searching without a warrant; for others, they would falsely claim that evidence was in plain sight.
He said deputies were entering homes without warrants so often that in 2022 a senior detective warned him that prosecutors in the district attorney's office had noticed and had demanded they stop.
The violent raids continued until at least 2023, when Mr. Dedmon and five other officers barged into a home without a warrant and then beat and tortured two Black men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins. One of the deputies shoved a gun in Mr. Jenkins's mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and leading to a federal investigation. Mr. Dedmon and the other officers pleaded guilty last year and were sentenced to prison.
'I lived a lie for long enough,' said Mr. Dedmon, who is serving a 40-year sentence. 'I owe the truth to my daughter, to every person in Rankin County and to law enforcement as a whole.'
District Attorney John K. Bramlett Jr., known as Bubba, has declined to share details on how his office has approached a review of drug cases for possible wrongful convictions.
But reporters found dozens of pending drug indictments that were dismissed, some of them citing the fact that deputies associated with the Goon Squad were unavailable as witnesses.
According to local defense lawyers, the district attorney's office is not reviewing cases where defendants pleaded guilty, ruling out a vast majority of drug cases involving the deputies. Mr. Dedmon estimated that there were hundreds of home search break-ins without warrants in recent years.
In their guilty pleas, six law enforcement officers, five of them deputies, admitted they had broken into a house without a warrant and brutalized Mr. Parker and Mr. Jenkins. Prosecutors described how the officers tried to conceal their actions by placing a gun at the crime scene, destroying surveillance footage and using drugs from another bust to falsely incriminate the men they attacked.
Mr. Dedmon said the actions officers took that night were extreme. He said that a majority of drug raids involved suspects who were buying or selling drugs, but that violence and a willingness to bend the rules to enter homes were common.
Often, Mr. Dedmon said, the deputies would carry out a 'buy bust,' where an informant would enter a home, buy drugs and 'then we would kick the door in upon them leaving.'
He said deputies knew that after securing a home, they should seek a search warrant from a judge and then wait at the property until they were cleared to gather evidence. That rarely happened, he said.
Instead, he said, deputies would immediately start their search and in their subsequent reports cite 'exigent' circumstances, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled allow a warrantless search. The court has held that officers do not need a warrant if they believe an informant is in danger, if a suspect is about to destroy evidence or if they face a similar emergency.
Eve Brensike Primus, a University of Michigan Law School professor and the director of the Public Defender Training Institute, said that if the evidence seized in a warrantless drug raid is critical to a case, 'that would be a serious Fourth Amendment violation that would result in reversal on appeal.'
The Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent arbitrary and harassing police searches through a warrant requirement, she said. 'We want police to go to a magistrate or judge to get a warrant before they search a home because homes are so private, and we want a judicial check on the police officer's determination of probable cause beforehand.'
Previous reporting by The Times and Mississippi Today documented 17 cases where victims and witnesses alleged misconduct by Rankin County deputies, often involving the same men convicted in the Parker and Jenkins case. Some described being beaten or choked or having guns shoved in their mouths until they confessed. One man said deputies shoved a stick down his throat until he vomited. Another said deputies used a blowtorch to melt metal onto his skin.
Mr. Dedmon said he and some other deputies learned their techniques from Brett McAlpin, a longtime narcotics investigator in the department whom federal prosecutors described as molding officers 'into the goons they became.' He said Mr. McAlpin handled writing up many of the raid reports and taught deputies how to use violence and humiliation to get information from drug crime suspects.
'The goal was to create as much chaos as possible to prevent such behavior in Rankin County,' Mr. Dedmon said. 'That's how they solved cases and prevented drugs from being sold in the community.'
He said he knew the violence was wrong, but he idolized Mr. McAlpin, who is now serving 27 years in the Parker and Jenkins case.
'He was the first person I ever saw destroy people's property out of his own hatred for the way they lived,' Mr. Dedmon wrote in an email. 'Sickly enough I grew to believe that it was the right thing to do!'
Mr. Dedmon said it was Mr. McAlpin who passed on a warning from a prosecutor in the district attorney's office demanding that 'the warrantless entries had to stop.' Mr. Dedmon said the warning was specifically aimed at him, according to what Mr. McAlpin told him. 'He said to me that times are changing at the D.A.'s office,' Mr. Dedmon recalled.
In a written statement, Jason Dare, the lawyer for the Sheriff's Department, said Mr. Dedmon's remarks insinuate 'that investigators with the Rankin County Sheriff's Department do not procure search warrants for residential searches. Such a generalized accusation against our investigators is false, defamatory and easily disproven through readily available public records.'
In 2023, while investigating allegations against the Goon Squad, reporters for Mississippi Today and The Times sought copies of warrants related to nine raids by the unit. The department did not provide the warrants and referred reporters to the district attorney's office, which declined to release any documentation.
Mr. Dare said Mr. Dedmon's statements to Mississippi Today show the former narcotics investigator 'admits that he knew right from wrong and admits to falsifying reports to the Sheriff's Department, both of which show that the training and policies of this department taught him how to legally and properly perform his duties. Assuming these statements are accurately reported, they show that Mr. Dedmon made the choice to commit criminal acts and is incarcerated as a result.'
Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said Mr. Dedmon's statements make it obvious that Rankin drug cases need to be reviewed for possible wrongful convictions.
'These perpetrators controlled the institution that was supposed to investigate these heinous crimes, leaving the victims no recourse,' she said. 'Mercifully, post-conviction allows attorneys to look back when our institutions fail — especially when the failure is of this magnitude.'
She said her office was willing to carry out this task and would need $400,000 in extra funding from the Mississippi Legislature to hire an additional investigator and part-time lawyers to review the cases.
Matt Steffey, professor of law at Mississippi College, said prosecutors are expected to seek justice, not just convictions, and have a responsibility to examine possible wrongful convictions, 'especially where the problems are as acute, profound and well documented as they are in the Goon Squad cases.'
The Mississippi attorney general's office, which prosecuted the Goon Squad cases with the Justice Department, also has the authority to review the Goon Squad cases.
But MaryAsa Lee, its communications director, said the office wasn't examining any cases.
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the nonprofit Innocence Project, said the district attorney 'has a constitutional and ethical obligation to notify every defendant in every conviction in which these cops played a role in the arrest or prosecution.'
That has yet to happen, according to lawyers representing some of the defendants.
Mr. Neufeld said that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to disclose any evidence that might clear a defendant, even if the evidence arises after that person's conviction.
'I've been involved in multiple situations where prosecutors notify hundreds of convicted defendants where there is misconduct far less egregious than that attributed to the Goon Squad,' he said.