A former Alabama Department of Corrections supervisor was convicted by a Jefferson County jury on April 8 of assaulting an incarcerated person in his custody at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama.
Former Sgt. Joe Binder was convicted of first-degree assault for causing serious physical injury to Ephan Moore by striking him with a baton on January 30, 2021. Mr. Moore was taken to an outside hospital with extensive facial injuries, skull fractures, and fractured ribs and fingers.
At trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Binder had assaulted Mr. Moore at least once before this incident by striking him in the head with a baton in 2016.
Two former ADOC officers, Cordaro Melton and Daryl Brown, were also charged with first-degree assault in connection with the 2021 incident. At Mr. Binder’s trial, prosecutors stated that he “played a major role in the crime as the supervisor” of the other officers.
First-degree assault is a Class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Mr. Binder’s sentencing has been scheduled for June 4, while the trials of Mr. Melton and Mr. Brown remain pending.
Employed at Donaldson since 1998, Mr. Binder has been named in more than a dozen federal lawsuits over the past 15 years alleging physical assault and excessive force against incarcerated people, which ADOC has spent tens of thousands of dollars to settle. ADOC suspended him for excessive force in 2011, but then promoted him to sergeant in 2020.
Mr. Binder is one of at least 89 ADOC officers and supervisors who have been arrested or criminally charged for crimes in the state’s prisons since 2019. Twenty-one of those individuals were supervisors at the rank of sergeant or higher.
In 2019, shortly after the U.S. Justice Department issued a findings letter about the violent and dangerous conditions in Alabama’s prisons, then-Commissioner Jeff Dunn said the officer culture in the department was part of the problem.
In an interview with AL.com, Mr. Dunn said, “Our [ADOC’s] core values are professionalism, accountability and integrity. You just have to read the DOJ report and you can see that there are times in which members of the DOC have not upheld those values.” He added that he was trying to improve the institutional culture.
In July 2020, the Justice Department issued a second letter notifying Alabama and ADOC officials that they had found a pattern of excessive force against people in the state’s prisons that violated their constitutional rights and concluded that the state was “fostering a culture where unlawful uses of force are common.” Federal investigators detailed their findings:
Uses of force are so commonplace in Alabama’s prisons that officers, even supervisors, watch other officers brutally beating prisoners and do not intervene. Throughout our investigation, we identified numerous examples of officers standing by and watching serious uses of excessive force occur and never speaking up or physically intervening. Uses of force happen so regularly in Alabama’s prisons that some officers appear accustomed to that level of violence and consider it normal.
Five months later, federal prosecutors sued Alabama and ADOC, alleging that they “have repeatedly failed to take reasonable measures to prevent correctional staff from inflicting serious harm on prisoners, even in the face of the obvious and substantial risk that staff will inflict such harm and the multiple occasions on which staff have in fact inflicted such harm.” The lawsuit remains ongoing.