A third former Mississippi sheriff's deputy has each been sentenced for his part in the torture of two Black men.
Michael Corey Jenkins, right, stands with his mother Mary Jenkins, as they join Eddie Terrell Parker, unseen, and supporters outside the courthouse in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 19, 2024, calling for harsh penalties against six former law enforcement officers who committed numerous acts of racially motivated, violent torture on himself and his friend Eddie Terrell Parker in 2023.
On Tuesday, Lee gave a nearly 20-year prison sentence to 31-year-old Hunter Elward and a 17.5-year sentence to 46-year-old Jeffrey Middleton. They, like Opdyke and Dedmon, worked as Rankin County sheriff's deputies during the attack. In a statement Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland condemned the “heinous attack on citizens they had sworn an oath to protect.”The terror began Jan. 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence when a white person in Rankin County complained to McAlpin that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a house in Braxton. McAlpin told Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies who were so willing to use excessive force they called themselves “The Goon Squad.
Opdyke was the officer who first went to the government and told them what happened, his attorney Jeff Reynolds said Wednesday. Opdyke came forward on April 12, showing investigators the WhatsApp text thread where the officers discussed their plan and what happened. He was able to do so because he didn’t throw his phone in a river, as some of the other officers did. Had he done so, investigators might not have discovered the encrypted messages.
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