About 7 months ago, I posted a video about a West Virginia police officer, Everette Maynard, formerly of the Logan, WV Police Department who was found guilty by a federal jury of violating an arrestee’s civil rights by using excessive force. This was caught on video. This is the one where the officer was caught by a surveillance camera flipping the bird to the camera. 

Today I talked to one of the investigators involved with that prosecution and thought I would give you an update video about what ended up happening to Officer Maynard. The DOJ recently issued another press release on the case, announcing that former-Officer Everette Maynard has been sentenced to 9 years of prison to be followed by 3 years of supervised release due to his conviction of violating an arrestee’s civil rights by using excessive force against him.

In the video I posted late last year, I showed you the actual photos presented to the jury during the trial, and I went over the actual jury instructions used in that case. Here’s the video:

This is a rare case of a police officer being held accountable in the most important way. He received almost a decade in prison for his actions. The U.S. Department of Justice had this to say about the sentencing of Maynard: 

“This defendant’s abuse of law enforcement authority inside a police station was egregious and caused serious injuries,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Police misconduct undermines community trust in law enforcement, and impedes effective policing. This sentence confirms that law enforcement officers who use excessive force against arrestees will be held accountable.”

Title 18, United States Code, Section 242 makes it a crime to deprive any person of his civil rights under color of law.  For a jury to find the defendant guilty, the federal prosecutors must prove each of the following elements beyond a reasonable doubt at trial:

1. The defendant acted under color of law;

2. The defendant deprived the victim of a right secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States – here, the right of an arrestee to be free from unreasonable seizures, which includes the right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a law enforcement officer; 

3. The defendant acted willfully; and

4. The defendant’s acts resulted in bodily injury to the arrestee. 

(NOTE: elements 1 and 2 are by themselves a misdemeanor; when elements 3 and 4 are present, it rises to the level of a felony.)

On Nov. 17, 2021, a federal jury convicted Maynard of using excessive force against an arrestee while Maynard was a police officer with the Logan Police Department in West Virginia. At trial, the jury heard evidence that Maynard assaulted the victim in the bathroom of the Logan Police Department before dragging him into an adjoining room, hauling him across the room, and ramming his head against a doorframe.

The assault initially rendered the victim unconscious and left him with a broken shoulder, a broken nose, and a cut to his head that required staples to close. While the defendant assaulted the victim, the defendant berated the victim for “making demands” of him by, among other things, asking to go to the bathroom. After the assault left the victim unconscious in a pool of his own blood, the defendant bragged about his use of force.

It’s important to note that, in this actual case, the jury was instructed that a police officer “may not use force merely because an arrestee questions an officer’s authority, insults the officer, uses profanity, or otherwise engages in verbal provocation – unless the force was otherwise objectively reasonable at the time it was used. Additionally, the jurors were instructed that an officer may not use force solely to punish, retaliate against, or seek retribution against another person. 

These sorts of unnecessary uses of violent force against arrestees, if true, can never be reasonable. 

How did the jurors know that it happened this way? Because it was captured on video, which is by-far the most important tool available to us for constitutional accountability. The police certainly like to use video evidence against the public in their prosecutions. But they don’t like it when it happens to them. In this case however, I’m told that it was actually a law enforcement officer who originally blew the whistle on this guy to federal investigators. Good for that individual. There needs to be more of this. And I have reason to believe that there will be more of this in West Virginia.