Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were convicted Monday of beating and pepper-spraying a mentally ill county jail inmate without provocation and then conspiring to lie in reports concealing the assault.
Bryan Brunsting and Jason “Johnson” Branum were convicted of three federal counts — conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights under color of law and falsification of records — in connection with the assault six years ago at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Jurors reached the verdict after about 90 minutes of deliberation.
The defendants each face up to 40 years behind bars when they are sentenced Aug. 22.
The case was the latest in a string of trials in Los Angeles federal court stemming from the FBI’s multi-year investigation into brutality and other misconduct in the sheriff’s department.
Prosecutors said the beating of pretrial detainee Philip Jones in a surveillance-free hallway at Twin Towers on March 22, 2010, was designed to both punish the inmate for swearing at a custody assistant and to teach a rookie officer — whom Brunsting was training — a lesson about how the jail really worked.
“They kicked him, struck him, sprayed him with OC (pepper) spray,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Greer Dotson told jurors last week, adding that Jones, who suffers from schizophrenia and hears voices, “wasn’t kicking, punching, swinging” or in any way fighting back.
The deputies then concocted a phony story that Jones was combative in order to explain the assault in a report that could have been used to refer the inmate for criminal prosecution, the federal prosecutor said. Richard Hirsch, Brunsting’s attorney, gave jurors a different narrative.
Jones, he said, was wandering around an area of the jail he was not authorized to be in and was ordered by custody assistant Porscha Singh to return to his module.
“It was a dangerous situation,” Hirsch told the nine-woman, five-man panel.
When Brunsting and other jail guards responded, Jones became “assaultive” and it became “necessary to use force,” the attorney said, telling the jury that the only injury suffered by the inmate was eye irritation from the pepper spray.
Neither defendant, nor Jones, took the stand during three days of testimony last week.
However, the prosecution had two key witnesses — ex-deputy trainee Joshua Sather and Singh.
Sather, who quit the department immediately following the Jones beating after a crisis of conscience, testified that Brunsting and Branum beat Jones until he was “screaming and crying,” and then fabricated reports to cover up the assault.
Sather also told the downtown jury that he saw Brunsting “spread (the victim’s) legs and kick the inmate in his private parts.”
Brunsting was Sather’s training officer at the county lockup on a floor housing mentally ill and suicidal inmates.
At one point, Sather testified, Brunsting told him that Jones had disobeyed an order and deputies would now teach the prisoner “a lesson.”
Brunsting, Branum and another lawman directed the inmate into an empty hallway that had no cameras and proceeded to attack Jones, the witness said.
In closing arguments Monday, Donald M. Re, Branum’s lawyer, said use-of- force reports penned by the defendants were entirely truthful.
“There was no cover up,” he said. “Why was there no cover up? Because there was no beating. Sather made it up.” The attorney pointed to medical reports that he said suggested that the only injury suffered by Jones was eye irritation from the pepper spray, administered to try to calm the aggressive inmate down. In unsuccessfully asking that the jury find his client not guilty, Hirsch said the testimony of Sather and Singh was riddled with inconsistencies.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox, in his closing argument, countered that the defense had succeeded only in chipping away at minor details in the witnesses’ testimony.
“Like piranhas,” the defense was “biting at the fringes of the case but never getting to the heart,” Fox told the jury, adding that “the inconsistencies are trivial.” Brunsting is charged separately in connection with a second incident in which a different Twin Towers inmate allegedly was assaulted and suffered bodily injury in August 2009.
The deputy will be tried on those allegations in the next few months before U.S. District Judge George Wu.
Brunsting and Branum were among 21 current and former sheriff’s officials to be tried by federal authorities in the jails investigation.
The probe reached the sheriff’s department’s highest offices. Ex-Sheriff Lee Baca pleaded guilty in February to a charge of lying to investigators and is awaiting a hearing in which a federal judge will consider signing off on a plea deal that would result in a sentence ranging from probation to six months in prison.
Baca’s former second-in-command, Paul Tanaka, was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice. The former undersheriff’s sentencing is set for June 20.
— Wire reports