(C) Georgia Recorder
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Georgia high court overturns ruling against six jailers in prisoner’s death; sides with widow in detainee’s death [1]
['Ross Williams', 'More From Author', '- October']
Date: 2023-10
The Georgia Supreme Court handed down a pair of rulings Wednesday siding against a group of jailers and a separate group of sheriff’s deputies both accused of killing people in custody.
In both cases, the justices disagreed with the suspects’ arguments and sent the cases back to a lower court.
Killed in Fulton County Jail
The justice’s first ruling allows criminal charges to proceed against six jailers accused of killing an inmate at the Fulton County Jail in 2018.
The jail has gained a reputation for an unsafe environment. Ten inmates have died so far this year in the facility, which was designed for 1,600 inmates but currently houses more than 2,900. State lawmakers recently announced an investigation into what Sheriff Patrick Labat calls a “humanitarian crisis.”
In September of 2018, the six defendants allegedly electrocuted, pepper sprayed and beat detainee Antonio May to death, according to filings from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
A grand jury charged the jailers with crimes including felony murder, but the Fulton County Superior Court blocked the indictment because they said the jailers were peace officers, which would have meant they were entitled to appear before the grand jury, which didn’t happen.
The court ruled that although the jailers did not have the power to arrest people, they were “vested with a duty to maintain public order, i.e., keep the peace,” among the approximately 3,000 inmates, and therefore should be entitled to the protections of being a peace officer.
Willis’ team argued that supervising inmates within the walls of a jail is inherently different from maintaining the public peace within a broader community and that only people who have the power to arrest can be considered peace officers.
The Supreme Court declined to resolve whether one must have the power of arrest to be considered a peace officer, but said the question is moot in this case because the defendants do not have a duty to maintain the public peace and therefore are not peace officers, whether they had the power to arrest or not.
Unlike police officers, who have a general duty to uphold the law and maintain the peace 24 hours a day, jailers’ authority only extends to the jailhouse and only lasts during their shifts, the justices wrote.
“Because the defendants’ primary duty of supervising and controlling a defined population of inmates was markedly limited in comparison to a traditional peace officer’s and because they had no duty to maintain the public peace in a general sense, we conclude that the trial court erred by deeming them peace officers,” wrote Justice Charlie Bethel in a unanimous decision.
Strapped into a patrol car
In a separate case, the justices sided with the widow of a man who died in police custody in 2019. The justices sent the case back to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
In April of that year, Tift County deputies took James Aaron McBrayer into custody after an altercation in which they used a taser on him.
McBrayer died after he was loaded into the back of a patrol car face down with his hands and feet restrained and his legs strapped to the car door and left unsupervised for more than 10 minutes.
His widow, Sherrie McBrayer, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Tift County Sheriff Gene Scarbrough. She said her husband died because he was negligently loaded into the vehicle.
Scarbrough argued the suit should be dropped because of sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine protecting government officials from lawsuits, but under state code, sovereign immunity can be waived in certain cases, and one of those cases is “for a loss arising out of claims for the negligent use of a covered motor vehicle.”
This case also hinged on the specific definitions of words, in this case “use” and “as a vehicle.”
Scarbrough’s lawyers said McBrayer did not show that her husband’s death arose from the deputies’ “use” of the patrol car “as a vehicle,” citing specific language from state code.
The Georgia Court of Appeals sided with Scarbrough. They noted that McBrayer’s complaint did not allege the patrol car was actively being used as a vehicle, or “that the car was running; that any deputy was seated in the car; that any deputy was poised to start the car or transport the decedent to any location.”
McBrayer’s attorneys argued that “using” a vehicle can also mean loading or unloading people or objects, and in a unanimous opinion authored by Justice John J. Ellington, the high court appeared to agree.
“The word, in ordinary and natural parlance, is broad and subject to nuances in meaning based upon the context in which it is employed,” Ellington’s decision reads. “For example, ‘use’ embraces the employment of a thing in both expected and unexpected ways, for example, using a hammer to strike a nail or using a hammer passively as a paperweight or actively as a murder weapon.”
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