Beating charges prompt inquiry
Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that corrections officers at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining orchestrated beatings during a prisonwide search in November, sending at least seven prisoners to the hospital and more than 20 others to a medical unit.
A flood of officers, including special teams from other prisons, converged on cells over at least two days, ordering prisoners to strip to their boxer shorts and then punching and kicking them and slamming their heads against walls or floors, according to affidavits by 26 inmates who are part of a lawsuit filed Jan. 31 against New York state.
The allegations are buttressed by hospital records and a separate interview with Shamel Capers, a former Sing Sing inmate who is not part of the lawsuit and gave a firsthand account of violence that occurred just days before he was released.
The prisoners in their sworn statements describe one officer holding a man’s arm against a radiator, burning him, and another officer twisting a prisoner’s wrist and thumb and threatening to break his hand. Another prisoner describes how he was blinded for days after being peppersprayed while he was handcuffed.
“Every part of my body was burning, like nothing I ever experienced,” the prisoner, Vincent Poliandro, said in his account. Bruce A. Barket, a lawyer whose firm filed the lawsuit in the state Court of Claims, said it reported the allegations to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which he said was investigating along with the FBI.
Barket said federal investigators have interviewed at least seven prisoners represented by the firm.
“This was nothing short of a planned attack on incarcerated men by correction officers,” Barket said. “Worse, it was approved of and overseen by highranking officials in the prison.”
He added, “In our view, staff and supervisors engaged in criminal conduct, and should be held accountable. The suit seeks $1 million in damages for each prisoner.
The U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI declined to comment on the investigation.
Thomas Mailey, a spokesperson for the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prisons, said in a statement that the agency cooperates with all investigations, but does not comment “to ensure the integrity of those investigations.”
The department said it has 21 of the special Corrections Emergency Response Teams, known as CERT, based in correctional facilities around the state that conduct facility searches, among other tasks. Many of those officers who participated in the incident at Sing Sing wore black
tactical gear with visors, according to the affidavits and Capers.
A spokesperson for the union for state corrections officers said the organization had no comment.
Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison opened in 1825 on the Hudson River, is about 30 miles north of New York City and holds about 1,400 inmates, the corrections department said. The facility is perhaps best known as the former home of the state’s execution chamber, where more than 600 people went to their deaths in the electric chair.
According to the affidavits, the beatings occurred largely on Nov. 9 in a housing area known as A block, and the next day in B block, when the prison was on lockdown.
Most accounts begin the same way: A prisoner is ordered to strip and carry his mattress out to be scanned for contraband. The prisoner is then directed to return to his cell and face the back wall, with his hands touching the wall above his head.
Then the beatings begin, the affidavits say.
Many of the prisoners who have joined the lawsuit still have years to go on their sentences.
But Capers, 25, is represented by different lawyers and said his assault occurred just days before he was ordered released by a Queens judge who found he was wrongly convicted in a murder case for which he had already served eight years of a 15 yearsto-life sentence.
“He was an innocent kid trapped behind bars for a crime
he didn’t commit,” said Elizabeth Geddes, a lawyer with one of the firms representing him. “When he finally reached the end of that very dark tunnel, officers decided to brutally beat him for no reason.”
Capers, in the interview with The New York Times, said he complied with orders to strip to his boxers and place his hands high on the back wall of his cell before four officers and started beating him, and stomped on him after he fell. One, he said, bent his hands back.
Capers said he did not try to defend himself, so that he would not incur a new charge that would imperil his release, which happened Nov. 17.