Ex-jailer will face fine, probation for lie to FBI

Scott Hazel, a former Pulaski County jail supervisor, was sentenced Friday to three years’ probation and fined $2,000 in connection with his June 2 guilty plea to a charge of making a false statement to FBI agents investigating whether he’d had sex with a female inmate.

Hazel was indicted Dec. 2, 2015, on a charge of sexual abuse of a ward, accused of engaging in a sexual act with a woman who was a federal prisoner being held at the jail while she awaited transfer to prison to begin serving a five-year sentence for a methamphetamine conviction. However, the sexual abuse charge was dropped in June in exchange for Hazel’s guilty plea to the false-statement charge, which stemmed from a civil-rights investigation into the sex allegations.

“This is a sad case,” Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller said Friday before imposing the probationary sentence, which requires Hazel to perform 100 hours of community service.

At the request of Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters, Miller also prohibited Hazel from working for any certified law enforcement agency, either as a paid employee or a volunteer, throughout his probation.

The false statement, according to Peters when she read stipulated facts into the record in June, stemmed from a Sept. 15, 2015, interview of Hazel by FBI agents. The agents asked Hazel, a classification sergeant at the jail, about the evening of Feb. 6, 2015, when he checked the woman out of her assigned place of detention and took her to a private office.

Hazel told the agents the woman was a confidential informant and that he took her to the private office to show her photographs of potentially corrupt guards. But that was a lie, he later admitted. The plea agreement said, “In fact, Hazel was not using [the woman] as a confidential informant and Hazel did not show [her] photos of guards. When Hazel made this statement, he knew it was false.”

The plea agreement didn’t say why Hazel took the woman into the private office. However, the indictment accused him of engaging in a sexual act with the woman on the same day.

A federal lawsuit filed on the woman’s behalf in 2016 accused Hazel of repeatedly sexually assaulting her in 2014 and 2015 while she was an inmate in the Pulaski County jail. The suit was settled in late July, canceling a jury trial that had been set to begin Sept. 12.

Details of the settlement are confidential, but Hazel denies he had any “inappropriate relations” with the woman, his attorney, Jamie Huffman Jones, said at the time.

In a statement of undisputed facts filed in the civil case last summer, before it was settled, David Fuqua, an attorney for the county, said that Pulaski County and Sheriff Doc Holladay wouldn’t dispute the woman’s allegations that Hazel, “over a period of months initiated and cultivated an inappropriate relationship with [the woman] for the purpose of engaging in a sexual relationship with her.”

Attorney Kathryn Hudson, who represented the woman, said last June that “there is no such thing as consensual sex with a prisoner,” and that Hazel “groomed her just like a pedophile grooms a child.”

Hazel resigned Oct. 13, 2015, about six days after he was given notice of a possible disciplinary action arising out of an internal investigation into an informant’s allegation that Hazel had engaged in sexual misconduct in 2014, Fuqua said in court documents.