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New York Times
29-03-2025
- New York Times
State Auditor to Investigate Sheriff Who Used Inmate Labor on Family Farm
The Mississippi State Auditor's office on Friday said it had launched an investigation into allegations that Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey had staffed his mother's commercial chicken farm with jail inmates who were in his custody. The investigation follows an article published Thursday by Mississippi Today and The New York Times in which former inmates and a former deputy described working on the farm and using equipment and supplies bought with taxpayer money. 'We're all aware of the reporting,' said Jacob Walters, communications director for State Auditor Shad White. 'We read the article, and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin yesterday morning, when we became aware of the story.' Mr. White's office can investigate potential misuse of government resources and file lawsuits to recoup taxpayer money. It does not have the authority to file criminal charges, but Mr. Walters said the office had alerted federal prosecutors to the allegations. Sheriff Bailey did not respond on Friday to requests for comment. In a statement issued late Thursday to some local media outlets, officials at the sheriff's department acknowledged that Sheriff Bailey had sent inmates from the Rankin County jail to work at his mother's farm, but said the inmates were always paid. The department did not share the statement with Mississippi Today or The Times. Several other news organizations published it, reporting that it had come from Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff's department. The statement said that the article by The Times and Mississippi Today had 'maliciously used unreliable sources and/or false allegations in an attempt to tarnish' Sheriff Bailey's reputation. Over six months, reporters from Mississippi Today interviewed more than 20 former inmates of the Rankin County jail and three former deputies. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county records. The reporting showed that for years, inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, had been brought to the farm to perform a variety of jobs, including cleaning tons of chicken feces and used bedding from chicken houses. Mr. Dare's statement did not directly address many of the details described by former trusties and by Christian Dedmon, a former Rankin County deputy who is serving a federal prison sentence for his part in torturing two Black men in 2023. For example, Mr. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey and others had used a $97,000 skid steer, bought in 2019 with department funds, to mulch, till soil and spread gravel at the farm. The statement did not address whether that was true. Instead, the statement noted that the sheriff 'owns a skid steer that is all-but identical to and commonly confused for the one owned by Rankin County.' In interviews before the article's publication, Mr. Dedmon said the sheriff had used the county's skid steer on the farm for years before purchasing his own skid steer and attachments. Mr. Dedmon also said that Sheriff Bailey had instructed him to take truckloads of gravel from a Rankin County government storage yard and deliver the gravel to Sheriff Bailey's family farm to be spread on dirt roads. Mr. Dedmon and a former trusty said they would sneak into the yard at night, using magnets to cover the department seal on the vehicle they used. Mr. Dare's statement did not address those details. It said that Sheriff Bailey had covered roads on the farm with gravel and crushed concrete purchased or donated from local businesses. 'I'm sure he's purchased gravel at some point in his life, but I also know we took a lot, too,' Mr. Dedmon wrote in an email to Mississippi Today on Friday. Mississippi Today reported that the department had spent about $600 on a brooder house, chicken netting and heat lamps that are designed to keep chicks warm. Those purchases were for a chicken coop at the jail that is used by inmates to get fresh eggs, the statement said. Mr. Dare did not respond to calls or emails from Mississippi Today reporters seeking clarification about the statement. Over the past few months, the reporters repeatedly asked department officials about work done by trusties, and about department purchases related to chicken farming; Mr. Dare declined to explain the purchases and said that Rankin County government officials would not provide comment for the article. In recent days, local news outlets have been inundated with hundreds of comments about Sheriff Bailey, though elected officials in Rankin County have largely avoided comment. Some local residents remained supportive of the sheriff, despite a series of revelations over the past two years that have clouded his time in office. In 2024, five Rankin deputies, including Mr. Dedmon, were sentenced to decades in federal prison for their role in the torture of two Black men. An investigation by Mississippi Today and The Times revealed a decades long reign of terror by sheriff's deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad. Grant Callen, the founder and chief executive of Empower Mississippi, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group that works on criminal justice issues, said the allegations were 'just the latest in a string of appalling and inexcusable behavior.' 'Individuals are innocent until proven guilty,' Mr. Callen said, 'but leadership matters.' Mississippi Today's reporting for this article was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- New York Times
‘You're His Property': How One Sheriff Used Inmate Labor on His Family Farm
Bryan Bailey, the Mississippi sheriff whose department had been under federal investigation for torturing people, staffed his mother's commercial chicken farm with inmates from the county jail and used taxpayer-purchased equipment to improve the grounds, according to four former inmates and a former deputy who said they had worked on the farm. They said inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, were repeatedly driven to the farm — sometimes by Sheriff Bailey himself — to perform various tasks on top of their daily work duties for Rankin County. Former trusties and others who worked on Sheriff Bailey's family farm said inmates had received cash or meals in exchange for the work. The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, said he had worked on the farm while he was on the clock at the sheriff's department. Over six months, reporters for Mississippi Today interviewed several former Rankin County sheriff's deputies and 20 former trusties. The trusties who said they had worked on the farm asked that their names not be used because they feared retribution. The reporters also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county financial records, as well as text messages Mr. Dedmon sent while working on the farm. The reporting revealed that for most of his 13 years in office, Sheriff Bailey used his position as the highest paid and most powerful public figure in his suburban county in ways that financially benefited himself and his family. Through his department's attorney, Sheriff Bailey declined to comment for this article. For years, people familiar with the sheriff's activities kept quiet, out of a sense of loyalty or because they feared crossing a popular sheriff with political connections across Mississippi. But that began to change in 2023, when five Rankin County sheriff's deputies were charged with civil rights offenses for torturing two Black men in their home and shooting one of them in the mouth. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today revealed that deputies in the department, including those who called themselves the Goon Squad, had used similar brutality for nearly two decades against those they suspected of using or dealing drugs. Dozens of victims have since shared their accounts of the violence and some community leaders have demanded that Sheriff Bailey resign. Mr. Dedmon, one of the five Rankin deputies who pleaded guilty in the torture case, has begun speaking openly about his time at the department. 'I hid everything for him,' Mr. Dedmon said of the sheriff. 'I done everything for him. I know now I was just a tool to be used during a certain time like everyone else.' In a series of interviews, Mr. Dedmon described how he had transported inmates from the Rankin County Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program to the farm and worked alongside them. Mr. Dedmon said the sheriff had instructed him to use a construction vehicle, bought by the department in 2019 for $97,000, to till soil for corn and clear wooded areas on the farm. The vehicle, called a skid steer by those who used it, was sometimes stored there, he said. Mr. Dedmon said workers on the farm also used other items that had been purchased by the department, including weed killer. County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff's department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000, nearly $10,000 worth of weed killer, as well as supplies designed to care for poultry. Reporters provided officials with a detailed list of purchases, along with specific descriptions of the duties detailed by trusties. Neither department officials nor county leaders would explain the purchases or answer questions for this article. Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff's department, said officials would no longer answer questions from Mississippi Today or The Times because a previous article from the publications had summarized a written statement by Mr. Dare instead of running it in full. That article quoted much of Mr. Dare's statement, but did not include his complaints that the news organizations had not written positive stories about the department. In addition to the farm work, former trusties said Sheriff Bailey had directed them to craft cabinets, install flooring or do other work for him and his associates. Several former trusties said they had worked on vehicles owned by deputies or by the sheriff, who earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid elected officials in Mississippi. Mr. Dedmon said that in 2020, he paid trusties to build the back deck of his home, at Sheriff Bailey's suggestion. A photograph shared by Mr. Dedmon's ex-wife and dated Feb. 29, 2020, shows Mr. Dedmon and three other men, all in civilian clothing, working on the deck. Several people familiar with the men identified two of them as former trusties who, records show, were serving jail time when the picture was taken. Mississippi law prohibits the use of public money or property by elected officials for their own use. Violations are punishable by fines or up to 20 years in prison. And the Mississippi Code of Ethics in Government bars public servants from using their positions for the economic gain of businesses with which they or their relatives are associated. 'That's broader than just using inmate labor, but it certainly includes using inmate labor,' said Roun McNeal, an instructional assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who serves on the board overseeing a state work program for prison inmates. Nearly all the former inmates interviewed by Mississippi Today praised the trusty program, saying it had helped them beat addiction and build skills for life after release. Several said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their duties at the farm. But other trusties said they had felt intense pressure to do whatever was asked of them without complaint. Rankin County's trusty program enables defendants to serve time in the county jail instead of going to a state prison. The program grants trusties special privileges and assigns them duties to help run the jail, all without pay, a common practice in trusty work programs across the nation. To become a trusty, some inmates signed documents agreeing to accept the maximum sentence for their crimes if they were 'removed from the program for any reason.' Trusties entered the program at Sheriff Bailey's recommendation, and department officials decided if and when trusties had violated the terms of their agreements, according to Andy Sumrall, a criminal defense attorney based in Jackson, Miss., who has represented a number of former trusties. 'The way the sheriff's trusty program is, you're his property,' one former trusty said. 'This ain't happening.' McLain Farms sits beside a two-lane road that snakes through the patchwork of farmland and forest south of Puckett, a quiet town in Rankin County with a welcome sign that reads: '300 good friendly folks and a few old soreheads.' The 38-acre farm came into Sheriff Bailey's family when his mother remarried in 1997. The farm yields corn and other produce, but its primary focus is raising chickens. In recent years, McLain has housed about 10,000 chickens annually for Tyson Foods, which harvests the eggs. Several former inmates who worked on the farm, all interviewed separately, said they were told by other trusties to keep the work secret. One recalled Sheriff Bailey warning trusties at the farm: 'We're not here. This ain't happening.' According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff often took two or more trusties to the farm in the afternoons to complete small tasks, like spraying weeds, sorting tools or cutting grass. The farm generates almost 300 tons of waste a year, a mixture of feces, feathers, uneaten feed and bedding. During the annual mucking of the chicken houses, the sheriff would have about six trusties on the farm every day, Mr. Dedmon said. At 9:29 the night before Halloween in 2020, Mr. Dedmon messaged his then-wife and told her he was covered in chicken waste, a text reviewed by Mississippi Today shows. She told reporters that work would sometimes last until 3 a.m. After one cleaning, a former trusty recalled, the sheriff took a dozen or so inmates in civilian clothes to Boots & More in Jackson, where he bought them replacements for their ruined boots. That former trusty said he worked 12-hour days every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in addition to several weekday evenings that lasted into the early morning hours. He said he was never paid. Dan Pacholke, a corrections consultant and co-founder of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, called the use of inmate labor for personal profit 'a huge ethical violation,' because the sheriff 'has the ability to control their destiny.' Even if inmates were paid, working on the sheriff's family farm could raise ethical concerns, according to Mr. Pacholke and other experts. 'Every decision you make about inmates, their agency is conflicted in some way, because they don't voluntarily live at that jail,' said Mr. McNeal, the criminal justice professor. Trusties gave different descriptions about their pay, which often depended on the kind of work they performed. But none of them described a formal process in which checks were issued or money was deposited into any account. Experts said that cash payments raised concerns about transparency, as they are impossible to track. The sheriff's department did not fulfill a records request made early this month seeking any documents related to payments to trusties. Taxpayer-funded chicken supplies In addition to relying on inmate labor to supplement the work force at his mother's chicken farm, Sheriff Bailey also used county funds and supplies at the farm, according to Mr. Dedmon, another former deputy and others familiar with the work. Mr. Dedmon and another person who worked on the farm told Mississippi Today that the sheriff had instructed them to take truckloads of gravel from the Rankin County government's stockpile and use it to resurface roads on the farm. Mr. Dedmon said he would sneak onto county property at night, sometimes with Sheriff Bailey, to take the gravel. 'I can't tell you how many loads of county gravel I've hauled down there on the weekends or at night with his dump trailer, or rode with him to do so,' Mr. Dedmon said. According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff had magnets made to conceal the sheriff's star on the department vehicle Mr. Dedmon used to pick up the gravel. The magnets, Mr. Dedmon said, were marked with the name of a nonexistent business, derived from the name of a former trusty: 'Cazell's Welding.' A photo taken last month shows gray gravel on the roads where Mr. Dedmon said the county gravel had been placed. The skid steer that Mr. Dedmon described using on the farm had been purchased by the department for search and rescue teams with money seized during drug raids, county documents show. Deputies said it was intended to help with storm cleanup. Mr. Dedmon mentioned the skid steer in a text message to his then-wife on Sept. 16, 2020: 'I just wanted to come home, but damn sheriff just came in here and asked me to run the skid steer to pucket for him.' County records show that in April 2019, the sheriff's department used $36,000 seized from drug busts to buy a mulching head. Mr. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey had used it to clear land on the farm. The sheriff's department also spent about $600 on items typically used in poultry farming. Among them: poultry netting, brooder lamps, which keep chicks warm, and an 'angled house brooder' to house chicks. Angela English, president of the Rankin County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which had called for Sheriff Bailey's resignation over the torture case, said more should be done to hold the sheriff accountable. 'When you provide someone with that much authority and they don't have to answer to anyone,' she said, 'you're asking for trouble.' Mississippi Today's reporting for this article was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- New York Times
Ex-Deputy Describes Rampant Violence by Mississippi ‘Goon Squad'
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.
