PANAMA CITY — Three of five former Washington County prison guards now have pleaded guilty in federal court to brutally beating an inmate in an orchestrated attack.
Former Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) officers William Francis Finch and Dalton Edward Riley pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to charges of violating an inmate’s human right to not endure cruel and unusual punishment. Robert Lewis Miller pleaded guilty earlier in April, and the three men each face as much as 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
The cases against James Fletcher Perkins and Christopher Blake Christmas are pending.
All five men were indicted on charges of violating 31-year-old Jeremiah Tatum’s civil rights at the Northwest Florida Reception Center (NWFRC) in Washington County during an act of jailhouse retaliation.
Each of the former officers pleaded not guilty Feb. 26 before the three reversed their stance.
According to the indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the attack allegedly was orchestrated by former Capt. James Kirkland as retaliation on Tatum. Kirkland and the other officers initially had been charged with malicious felony battery on an inmate. However, Kirkland was excluded from the federal indictment for human rights violations after he was found dead in December from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The arrests of the officers stemmed from an Aug. 5 incident, during which Tatum was left severely injured.
Unruly inmates at the NWFRC are usually subdued in their cells with intermittent treatments of pepper spray, according to court documents. Days before the beating, Tatum had been deemed unruly and Kirkland attempted to employ pepper spray treatments. Tatum blocked those efforts and the pepper spray in turn got onto Kirkland, investigators reported.
The incident would not bode well for Tatum.
Kirkland was the officer in charge a few nights later. Finch was listed as the assistant officer in charge. Moments before the incident, Kirkland taunted Tatum in his cell to elicit “disruptive behaviors” from Tatum, which worked, according to court documents.
Finch and Kirkland applied two rounds of pepper spray treatment on Tatum within his cell, and Kirkland called in the five-man extradition team to escort Tatum to a decontamination shower, prosecutors allege. As the men equipped themselves for the extradition, Kirkland allegedly told the officers he would state Tatum spit on him leading up to the beating “to teach him a lesson,” according to court records.
Video from the prison showed Tatum being slammed face first to the concrete floor by Finch and Riley while Tatum’s hands were restrained behind his back and his ankles restrained. The three other officers then jumped on Tatum and pinned him to the ground, according to arrest records.
Following that, Finch and Kirkland allegedly falsified reports from themselves and Riley that the incident was caused by Tatum spitting on Kirkland, though each of the subordinate officers would later tell investigators the attack was designed by their supervisor.
Two of those officers’ cases, Christmas and Perkins, are pending in federal court. Miller is scheduled to be sentenced June 17. Finch’s and Riley’s sentencings had been set for July 1.