Former Kentucky prison employees plead guilty to trying to cover up assault on inmate
A former federal prison employee admitted Monday to trying to cover up the assault of an inmate at a Kentucky prison.
Randy Nickell, a former sergeant at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex in West Liberty, supervised three correctional officers who carried a restrained inmate into a shower, laid him face down and kicked and punched him, court records show. The assault occurred July 24, 2018.
In a federal court in Ashland, Nickell, 54, pleaded guilty to three counts of obstruction of justice in relation to the incident. Also Monday, James D. Benish, one of the correctional officers involved, pleaded guilty to one count of deprivation of an inmate’s civil rights. Two other correctional officers entered guilty pleas last year in connection with the incident.
Benish, 36, carried the inmate — who is identified in court documents as M.M. — into the shower along with the other officers and also witnessed the assault.
“At the time of the assault, M.M. was unresisting, lying face-down, and restrained by handcuffs and leg shackles,” Benish’s plea deal said.
Nickell witnessed the beating but later omitted “any mention of the unlawful uses of force he had witnessed” when writing a report about the incident, court documents said.
In the days following the incident, Nickell also denied that an assault occurred before a Kentucky State Police trooper and another prison supervisor who was assigned to investigate the case.
Benish also drafted a report omitting any mention of witnessing the assault and denied seeing it in interviews with investigators, records show.
Both Benish and Nickell are scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 11. Benish could receive up to a decade in prison while Nickell faces a maximum of up to 20 years in prison per charge. The two other correctional officers who have entered guilty pleas are scheduled to be sentenced on the same day.
Last July, former corrections officer Derek A. Mays pleaded guilty to filing a false report in relation to the incident. Then in August, Jeffery T. Havens, another one of the correctional officers, pleaded guilty to a count of deprivation of an inmate’s civil rights for taking part in the assault.
Each of the plea documents list the correctional officers by their initials and only one — an individual identified as R.D. — does not have a guilty plea associated with them.
