Joshua Conner Jones, a former correctional officer with the Walker County Sheriff’s Office in Jasper, Alabama, pleaded guilty last week to federal charges stemming from the hypothermia death of Anthony “Tony” Mitchell in 2023.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Jones for conspiring with other Walker County Jail staff to violate Mr. Mitchell’s constitutional rights by “depriving him of humane conditions of confinement including, but not limited to, adequate food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, and medical and mental health care,” which resulted in his death.
The plea agreement does not identify Mr. Mitchell by name, but Mr. Jones’s lawyer confirmed it relates to Mr. Mitchell’s death.
Tony Mitchell, 33, was arrested and taken to the Walker County Jail by sheriff’s deputies responding to a request for a mental health welfare check on January 12, 2023. In a detailed plea agreement entered last week, Mr. Jones says he and other correctional officers were told that Mr. Mitchell had shot at deputies.
Mr. Mitchell “could not walk or stand on his own” when he arrived at the jail, according to the plea. He was “disoriented, non-combative, and could not follow instructions,” so “helpless that he was not capable of undressing or dressing himself,” and it was “obvious to everyone” that he needed to be taken to a hospital.
Instead, Mr. Jones said officers put him in the drunk tank—“a cement box with a small grate on the floor” that “did not have a sink, a toilet, access to any running water, or a raised platform to be used as a bed” and was “notoriously cold during winter months and the temperature on the bare cement floor was even colder”—and denied him medical attention until the day he died two weeks later.
Tony Mitchell
The jail was fully capable of providing medical help to Mr. Mitchell—who “was frailer than most other inmates”—but Mr. Jones admitted that he conspired with other officers to deny Mr. Mitchell medical help by falsely telling medical staff he was too “combative” to be treated. They called him “combative” as “an excuse to mistreat him,” Mr. Jones said.
Mr. Jones admitted that he and his co-conspirators continued to actively deny care to Mr. Mitchell “despite his obvious need for mental health and medical services.” He was exhibiting severe mental health symptoms, “talking incoherently about ‘demons’ and ‘portals’” and “was often covered in feces, which was an indication that he could not care for himself,” and his condition deteriorated over the next two weeks. Mr. Jones observed:
As the time passed [Mr. Mitchell] was almost always naked, wet, cold, and covered in feces while lying on the cement floor without a mat or blanket. By the second week of incarceration, [Mr. Mitchell] was largely listless and mostly unresponsive to questions from officers.
Mr. Jones admitted that he and other officers “actively chose not to provide care” to Mr. Mitchell despite his “obvious suffering” because they said “he gets what he gets since he shot at cops” and should have been killed rather than brought to the jail where they had to deal with him.
On the morning of January 26, 2023, a nurse repeatedly told Mr. Jones and jail supervisors that Mr. Mitchell urgently needed to be taken to a hospital or he could die. They did not call an ambulance and instead waited more than three hours before taking him to the hospital in the back of a patrol car. When he arrived at the hospital, Mr. Mitchell’s internal body temperature was reportedly 72 degrees. Doctors tried for three hours to resuscitate him before he was declared dead at 1:15 pm.
Mr. Mitchell’s death was ruled a homicide, according to a death certificate obtained by ABC3340 News. The cause of death was listed as hypothermia with underlying cause of “sepsis resulting from infected injuries obtained during incarceration and medical neglect.”
Mr. Jones admitted that “collectively we did it. We killed him.” He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for the federal conspiracy offense.
Mr. Jones also pleaded guilty to hitting a pretrial detainee in the face repeatedly with a can of pepper spray, resulting in bodily injury, and writing a false report to cover it up. That crime carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The plea agreement describes five unnamed staff members as co-conspirators in the death of Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Jones’s attorney said, “I expect this is the tip of the iceberg and in the coming weeks you will see multiple other individuals charged for the death of Mr. Mitchell as a result of the actions or inaction of employees of the Walker County Sheriff’s office.”