A former guard at an upstate New York prison was convicted of murder on Monday in the beating death of an inmate, while two others on trial with him were acquitted.
The case was part of a remarkable mass prosecution that put New York’s culture of incarceration on trial in Utica, N.Y. Of 10 guards initially charged in the beating, six have pleaded guilty. Another is scheduled to be tried in January.
The 10 men were members of a group whose attack on Robert L. Brooks, 43, at the Marcy Correctional Facility in December was captured by their body-worn cameras.
All three defendants — David Kingsley, Mathew Galliher and Nicholas Kieffer — were charged with second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter and faced a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
But the jury convicted only Mr. Kingsley, who was captured on video wrapping his gloved hands around Mr. Brooks’s neck and lifting him during the beating. The acquittal of the two other officers on both murder and manslaughter charges shocked Mr. Brooks’s supporters, who were fixtures in the courtroom.
As the verdicts were announced, there were gasps and cries. Family members of Mr. Kieffer broke down in tears.
That footage of guards punching, choking and stamping on Mr. Brooks while he was handcuffed and shackled in an infirmary was released to the public shortly after the December attack. It ignited an outcry and became a symbol of a troubled prison system, bringing renewed attention to longstanding complaints of unpunished beatings of inmates by correction officers. Many believed the footage would help prosecutors secure murder convictions.
Two guards who accepted plea deals testified against their former colleagues for lesser sentences. The images of Mr. Brooks’s death broke through the blue line of silence among guards.
The video footage was played during a proceeding that stretched over nearly two weeks in a small, ornate courthouse in Utica, in Oneida County, home to three state prisons, including Marcy. The footage constituted a “snuff film of a helpless prisoner,” William J. Fitzpatrick, the prosecutor trying the case, said in his closing arguments on Wednesday.
Mr. Brooks, who had served much of a 12-year sentence on an assault conviction after stabbing his girlfriend, was pronounced dead several hours after the assault. His death was ruled a homicide.
The case became a window into upstate New York’s prison culture and the region’s deep ties to the institutions. It occurred before thousands of guards across the state walked out in February in a three-week wildcat strike over hazardous working conditions and staff shortages.
New York’s corrections system, with its 42 prisons holding more than 30,000 people, has long been the target of complaints of inmate abuse. For some observers and advocates, the trial seemed like a long-awaited moment of accountability.
The guards who beat Mr. Brooks had tried to deactivate their body cams but were unaware that the devices were still operating in a default “passive” mode, capturing video but not audio.
“Fate recorded those videos,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said in his closing arguments on Wednesday.
Still, it was not enough for a jury to convict Mr. Galliher and Mr. Kieffer, whose family took up two full aisles in the back of the courtroom.
Lawyers for the guards argued vigorously in their summations that their clients’ actions had been genuine attempts to subdue a combative Mr. Brooks and follow orders in a chaotic situation.
The defense lawyers blamed poor supervision by superiors and improper training.
During the trial, Mr. Kieffer’s lawyer, David Longeretta, called Mr. Brooks less an innocent and docile inmate but rather a violent criminal who had had previous altercations with other inmates and “was in prison for stabbing his girlfriend repeatedly while in a drug-induced frenzy.”
Mr. Galliher’s lawyer, Kevin Luibrand, said during trial that his client did not strike Mr. Brooks, and he pointed out segments in the video that he said showed that other officers had a more active role in the fatal beating.
Mr. Kingsley’s lawyer, Luke Nebush, had argued that his client was “following procedure.”
After the verdict was read on Monday, court officers handcuffed Mr. Kingsley’s hands behind his back and led him out of the courtroom and into the very prison system he once helped operate.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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