Sentencing Guidelines Don't Apply to White LA Deputies in Planned Assault on Mentally Ill Black Man & Conspiracy to Lie About It

From [HERE] and [HERE] and [HERE] Two white L.A. sheriff's deputies will spend time in federal prison for the beating of a Black mentally ill jail inmate in 2010, U.S. District Judge George W. Wu ruled today.

Bryan Brunsting, 32, was leniently sentenced to 21 months behind bars; Jason Branum, aka Jason Johnson, 36, received five months - also a lenient sentence. They were found guilty in May of violating the inmate's civil rights and of falsifying records to cover up the beating.

Brunsting instigated the attack in a Twin Towers Correctional Facility in a locked hallway where no cameras were present, federal prosecutors said, because he felt the victim had shown disrespect to a civilian sheriff's employee. Ex-sheriff's trainee Joshua Sather testified in court that Brunsting said he and Branum were about to "teach" the inmate "a lesson." Sather quit after the incident.

The victim, Philip Jones, was punched, kicked in the genitals and doused with pepper spray before he was handcuffed and sent for medical care, authorities said. Prosecutors said the victim suffered from schizophrenia and sometimes heard voices in his head. He was screaming and crying during the assault, Sather testified.

When they were done, Sather testified, the deputies gathered privately to concoct a justification for the beating that they gave sheriff’s officials in falsified reports.

“They conspired to assault somebody,” Fox said. “They conspired to cover it up.”  

The rookie deputy testified that he was told what to say and how to write his report. As prosecutors argued at trial, the reports submitted by Brunsting and the rookie were strikingly similar, and were written to justify the use of force by falsely claiming that the victim had attempted to punch the rookie.

The deputies' cover story included allegations that Jones was combative and thus instigated the use of force. Brunsting also faced allegations of brutality in a 2009 case involving an inmate at the same facility.

"Deputy Brunsting’s conduct was even more egregious given that he was involved in the abuse of a second inmate, and he was training new deputies on how to violate inmates’ civil rights and get away with it," the U.S. Attorney in L.A., Eileen M. Decker, said in a statement today.

As a training deputy Brunsting taught the officers he mentored how to use violence to command respect from inmates and then lie to cover it up. In August 2009, Fox wrote in a court filing, Brunsting choked out an inmate and wrote a false report under the name of a deputy he was training. Prosecutors dropped the charges stemming from that incident in exchange for Brunsting agreeing to allow the judge to consider the conduct when he is sentenced.

“This is acting with impunity,” Fox said. “This is saying, ‘We are above the law.’”

The sentences are the latest shots fired in the U.S. Attorney's case against corruption and civil rights abuses in county jail facilities run by the department under former Sheriff Lee Baca. The 74-year-old faces charges that he obstructed a federal investigation into his jails, committed criminal conspiracy and lied to the feds. His trail starts next week.

Baca's former second-in-command, Paul Tanaka, was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the conspiracy. Part of the scheme, feds allege, was to try to silence an FBI investigator by having cops go to her house and threaten to arrest her, a move federal prosecutors didn't seem to admire.

"As a result of today’s guilty verdicts," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, "20 current or former members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department have now been convicted of federal charges."