One of the 10 corrections associated with The common drop death of a prisoner in Central New York Last year, guilty of first degree manslaughter on Monday argued.
The officer, Christopher Walrath, 37, agreed with a plea offered by the prosecution, including he will spend 15 years in prison and will receive supervision after the release.
He is the first officer to take a plea in connection with the murder of the prisoner, Robert Brooks, 43, who was destroyed in December in Marcy Correctional Facility in Marcy, NY, near Utica. The attack that took place while Mr. Brooks was fascinated, was Recorded by cameras worn by officers. Mr. Brooks was black and all the officers who see attacks seem to be white.
During a appearance on Monday morning in front of a judge in Oneida County Court, Mr. Walrath confirmed that he wrongly left his position and at the attack on Mr. Brooks has connected in three separate parts of the prison. He said he hit him in the groin and placed him in a chokehold, both actions that are forbidden by departmental guidelines.
Mr Brooks was declared dead the day after beating in a hospital in Utica.
William J. Fitzpatrick, the district procurer of Onondaga County and the special public prosecutor in the case, told Reporters on Monday that the attack on Mr Brooks, who had arrived in prison only 30 minutes earlier, had seemed to have been a kind of violent initiation in the life in Marcy Correction.
He called the attack a ‘Welcome to Marcy’ and said it was ’emblematic for the problems here and in the entire system’.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said he would continue to prosecute the other nine officers who have been accused of a series of crimes, including murder, manslaughter and tampering with evidence.
“Nothing in his story releases the other defendants,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick after the hearing about Mr. Walrath.
Walrath will be officially convicted on August 4.
In a statement, Robert Brooks Jr., the son of Mr. Brooks, called Mr. Walrath’s culprit “an important but modest step on the long way to justice for my father.”
“Now Mr. Walrath’s life is in the hands of prison officials,” said the son of Mr. Brooks. “This must be a frightening prospect for him and his family, knowing to what staff is capable of and how little the system appreciates the lives of locked people.”
“I pray that Mr. Walrath has the chance in prison to rehabilitate himself and come out a better man,” he added. “This is what every person deserves in prison, but it was malignant taken away from my father.”
The attack was absorbed by body cameras worn by four Marcy officers. Images from the cameras, which were made public by the attorney general of New York, Letitia James, conquered the beating in disturbing details.
The video showed officers who wore boots that a linked Mr. Brooks in the groin and the chest, choking him and pin him on an sickness examination table while they hit him.
In the images his face is covered with blood and his body seems to be limp.
The killing of Mr. Brooks was a creepy episode in a broader crisis in the state prison system, which was plagued by violence. Earlier this year, thousands of officers spent weeks with an illegal strike Spread chaos Through the prisons.
During that period of unrest, in March, another prisoner, Messiah Nantwi, 22, was killed in a prison across the street in which Mr Brooks died, in what Nine prisoners interviewed by the New York Times Said was a beating due to corrections. Employees of fifteen correction department were made leave as part of an investigation into his death.
Mr. Brooks was a 12 -year prison sentence for first degree attack at the time of his death. In 2017, he had been guilty in stabbing a former girlfriend in Monroe County, according to judicial documents and prison registers.
Mr. Brooks had broadcast his sentence in Mohawk Correctional Facility, a short drive of the Marcy -Prison, until the day of the attack. Both are medium security facilities.
He was moved to the Marcy Prison for his own safety after he was involved in a fight with other Mohawk prisoners, said Mr. Fitzpatrick.