Inmate strips for cherry pie; jail officers lose their jobs
Saturday, November 11, 2006 12:24 AM EST
— Union officials say the officers should not have been fired for the incident.
By Dennis Pelham
Daily Telegram Staff Writer
ADRIAN — Two Lenawee County Jail officers were fired this week for allegedly urging an inmate to strip naked and run around his cellblock in exchange for some cherry pie.
“It happened. I think we took decisive action to keep a dumb mistake from happening again,” said Sheriff Larry Richardson.
Union officials are challenging the firings as too drastic a reaction by administrators worried about comparisons to abuse at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq.
“My understanding of the incident is no, it’s not,” said union local president Deputy Michael Osborne. There was nothing remotely similar to the incidents in Iraq where naked prisoners were forced to pile onto each other or pose in sexually abusive positions, he said.
“We are looking at going to a grievance process,” Osborne said. If a grievance is denied, he said, union officials could take the case into a state arbitration process.
Richardson said the decision to fire the two officers was not taken lightly. The county’s labor attorney recommended the firings, he said, because of what happened at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq. He said the attorney told him, “If you don’t act and nip this in the bud, you’re going to be in trouble.”
Richardson said the two corrections officers were two of the jail’s best employees. He learned of the incident, he said, from a letter another inmate wrote to him after being released from jail.
The officers admitted to what they considered a prank “streaking” incident, Richardson said.
He said the investigation found that a male inmate saw the two officers eating in the jail’s glass-enclosed control tower and started a conversation with them over the intercom in his cell. The inmate asked for some their McDonald’s restaurant food, he said, and the conversation escalated to joking about what he would do for cherry pie.
The inmate was told if he would go streaking he would get a piece of pie, Richardson said. The officers then opened his cell door from the control room and the inmate ran naked through the cell block, he said. All other inmates in the cell block remained locked in their cells.
The incident happened in August, Richardson said. An investigation was started after he learned about it and reports were reviewed by the Lenawee County prosecutor’s office.
“We had to be satisfied there was no criminal act,” Richardson said.
After the prosecutor’s office ruled there was no crime, he said, the department proceeded with an internal disciplinary action.
Osborne said any suggestion of abuse of jail inmates has to be taken seriously.
“I can understand that, but also you have to take a look at the work performance of the people involved,” he said. It is not normal procedure, he said, to fire officers with otherwise clean records after a single incident with no intermediate action.
