LA sheriff faces mounting legal challenges

In photo, Gabriel Carrillo after deputies beat him at jail. From [HERE] and [HERE] Jail commanders condoning the beating of inmates. Evidence withheld from inmates accused of attacking guards. A photo of a woman wearing an official-looking badge while brandishing handguns at a nightclub. Allegations and litigation continue to dog Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who has acknowledged being out of touch about problems in his jails and failing to reform his massive department that oversees the largest county jail system in the nation.

Bad news in the past week has come from his own brass, his chief critics and a photo that surfaced in an unrelated federal investigation -- all serving to sully the reputation of the popular four-term sheriff, who enjoys the limelight and is flown around the world at the invitation of others to talk about policing tactics.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a constant critic of the sheriff and a court-appointed monitor of jail conditions, sued Tuesday alleging that inmates charged with assaulting deputies have been unable to get evidence that could help exonerate them.

At the core of the problems facing the department is how its deputies treat some of the estimated 15,000 inmates in county jails. The ACLU has filed another lawsuit accusing Baca and some other department officials of condoning violence against inmates. That sued was filed in January. 

Last year the civil rights group released a report that documented more than 70 cases of alleged abuse and other misconduct by deputies, many of which occurred at Men's Central Jail. The FBI has launched its own investigation and asked for internal department records dealing with inmate abuse.

On July 6, Capt. Michael Bornman testified before a county commission looking into deputy abuse in the jails that the former head of the jail, Capt. Daniel Cruz, resisted efforts to investigate employees who were accused of excessive force. Bornman described a culture of brutality where Cruz allegedly joked about not hitting inmates in their face so marks wouldn't be visible. Cruz has denied the accusations.

In the suit filed in January the ACLU accuses the department's top brass of having "acquiesced in, fostered, and implicitly authorized" the abuse by failing to supervise deputies, by failing to perform meaningful investigations into reports of abuse, and by failing to hold guilty deputies accountable.

States the lawsuit:

Rampant violence at the Jails has resulted from a failure of leadership at the top level of the Department. Such a pervasive, deeply-entrenched, and notorious pattern of excessive force could not have continued unabated over a period of many years without a code of silence on the part of front-line and supervisory staff, combined with management staff's failure to require accountability, and their engaging in an outright cover-up.

Throughout the lawsuit, the ACLU provides reams of examples of inmates claiming to have witnessed beatings or been abused. One of them is Gabriel Carrillo, whose beating by deputies in the visiting lobby of Men's Central Jail was first reported last spring by LA Weekly.

The lawsuit chronicles a history of evidence of abuse and provides plenty of examples of other related issues, including deputies using inmates to beat on other inmates, abuse victims experiencing retaliation and racially motivated violence against inmates.

In one instance this last August, for example, the lawsuit states that a deputy repeatedly slammed the face of an African-Ameican inmate into a wall, after which the deputy allegedly said, "I hate you motherfucking monkeys. Damn nigger!"

Overall, the violence against inmates is describes as:

Slamming inmates' heads into walls, punching them in the face with fists, kicking them with boots, and shooting them multiple times with tasers - and for these beatings to result in serious injuries to the inmates, including broken legs, fractured eye sockets, shattered jaws, broken teeth, severe head injuries, nerve damage, dislocated joints, collapsed lungs, and wounds requiring dozens of stitches and staples.

Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project, calls Baca's jails the "shame of the nation," and says the goal of the lawsuit is, "to ensure and end at long last to the reign of terror by deputies against inmates."