Former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy describes rampant violence by ‘Goon Squad’

by Jerry Mitchell, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield, Mississippi Today
February 21, 2025

In a series of interviews from prison, a former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy described for the first time how he and others in his department regularly entered homes without warrants, beat people to get information and illegally seized evidence that helped convict people of drug crimes.

His statements corroborate many aspects of an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today that uncovered a two-decade reign of terror by Rankin County sheriff’s deputies, including those who called themselves the “Goon Squad.” They also shed new light on the deputies’ tactics and the scope of their violent and illegal behavior.

The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who once led the department’s narcotics division, told Mississippi Today in emails and phone calls that drug raids occurred in suburban Rankin County, outside Jackson, almost every week for years.

He said deputies regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects to get them to share information during the raids. And he said they often seized evidence without a legally required warrant, raising questions about possible wrongful convictions in hundreds of narcotics cases stemming from the raids.

For some raids, he said, the deputies would falsely describe emergency circumstances that gave them cover for searching without a warrant; for others, they would falsely claim that evidence was in plain sight.

He said deputies were entering homes without warrants so often that in 2022 a senior detective warned him that prosecutors in the district attorney’s office had noticed and had demanded they stop.

The violent raids continued until at least 2023, when Dedmon and five other officers barged into a home without a warrant and then beat and tortured two Black men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins. One of the deputies shoved a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and leading to a federal investigation. Dedmon and the other officers pleaded guilty last year and were sentenced to prison.

“I lived a lie for long enough,” said Dedmon, who is serving a 40-year sentence. “I owe the truth to my daughter, to every person in Rankin County and to law enforcement as a whole.”

District Attorney Bubba Bramlett has declined to share details on how his office has approached a review of drug cases for possible wrongful convictions.

But reporters found dozens of pending drug indictments that were dismissed, some of them citing the fact that deputies associated with the Goon Squad were unavailable as witnesses.

According to local defense lawyers, the district attorney’s office is not reviewing cases where defendants pleaded guilty, ruling out a vast majority of drug cases involving the deputies. Dedmon estimated that there were hundreds of home search break-ins without warrants in recent years.

In their guilty pleas, six law enforcement officers, five of them deputies, admitted they had broken into a house without a warrant and brutalized Parker and Jenkins. Prosecutors described how the officers tried to conceal their actions by placing a gun at the crime scene, destroying surveillance footage and using drugs from another bust to falsely incriminate the men they attacked.

Dedmon said the actions officers took that night were extreme. He said that a majority of drug raids involved suspects who were buying or selling drugs, but that violence and a willingness to bend the rules to enter homes were common.

The most frequent approach was a “knock and talk,” where deputies would tell those inside that they would not be arrested or that it would be easier for them if they cooperated, he said.

That might be a lie because they might be arrested or charged, he wrote. “It’s not illegal and is often used as a tactic to lie to violators to get them to cooperate and make your job easier.”

Dedmon said the deputies would also carry out a “buy bust,” where an informant would enter a home, buy drugs and “then we would kick the door in upon them leaving.”

He said deputies knew that after securing a home, they should seek a search warrant from a judge and then wait at the property until they were cleared to gather evidence. That rarely happened, he said.

Instead, he said, deputies would immediately start their search and in their subsequent reports cite “exigent” circumstances, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled allow a warrantless search. The court has held that officers do not need a warrant if they believe an informant is in danger, if a suspect is about to destroy evidence or if they face a similar emergency.

Eve Brensike Primus, a University of Michigan Law School professor and the director of the Public Defender Training Institute, said if the evidence seized in a warrantless drug raid is critical to a case, “that would be a serious Fourth Amendment violation that would result in reversal on appeal.”

The Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent arbitrary and harassing police searches through a warrant requirement, she said. “We want police to go to a magistrate or judge to get a warrant before they search a home because homes are so private, and we want a judicial check on the police officer’s determination of probable cause beforehand.”

Previous reporting by The Times and Mississippi Today documented 17 cases where victims and witnesses alleged misconduct by Rankin County deputies, often involving the same men convicted in the Parker and Jenkins case. Some described being beaten or choked or having guns shoved in their mouths until they confessed. One man said deputies shoved a stick down his throat until he vomited. Another said deputies used a blowtorch to melt metal onto his skin.

Dedmon said he and some other deputies learned their techniques from Brett McAlpin, a longtime narcotics investigator in the department whom federal prosecutors described as molding officers “into the goons they became.” He said McAlpin handled writing up many of the raid reports and taught deputies how to use violence and humiliation to get information from drug crime suspects.

“The goal was to create as much chaos as possible to prevent such behavior in Rankin County,” Dedmon said. “That’s how they solved cases and prevented drugs from being sold in the community.”

He said he knew the violence was wrong, but he idolized McAlpin, who is now serving 27 years in the Parker and Jenkins case.

“He was the first person I ever saw destroy people’s property out of his own hatred for the way they lived,” Dedmon wrote in an email. “Sickly enough I grew to believe that it was the right thing to do!”

He said it was McAlpin who passed on a warning from a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office demanding that “the warrantless entries had to stop.” Dedmon said the warning was specifically aimed at him, according to what McAlpin told him. “He said to me that times are changing at the D.A.’s office,” Dedmon recalled.

In a written statement, Jason Dare, the lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department, said Dedmon’s remarks insinuate “that investigators with the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department do not procure search warrants for residential searches. Such a generalized accusation against our investigators is false, defamatory and easily disproven through readily available public records.”

In 2023, while investigating allegations against the Goon Squad, reporters for Mississippi Today and The Times sought copies of warrants related to nine raids by the unit. The department did not provide the warrants and referred reporters to the district attorney’s office, which declined to release any documentation.

Dare said Dedmon’s statements to Mississippi Today show the former narcotics investigator “admits that he knew right from wrong and admits to falsifying reports to the Sheriff’s Department, both of which show that the training and policies of this department taught him how to legally and properly perform his duties. Assuming these statements are accurately reported, they show that Dedmon made the choice to commit criminal acts and is incarcerated as a result.”

Dare said the sheriff “has remained committed to the safety and protection of Rankin County citizens.” Last week, the Rankin County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution praising the sheriff for helping save the life of a man who shot himself.

In a 2023 press conference, the sheriff declared that he knew nothing about the violence that his deputies were carrying out. “The badge worn by so many has been tarnished by the criminal acts of these few individuals,” he said. “I’ve tried to build a reputation here, tried to have a safe county, and they have robbed me of that.”

Dedmon said for the sheriff to get on TV and “act as if we’re just some crazy guys that slipped through the cracks is insane, political and misleading.” He said he’s seen more than a dozen different officers use excessive force, “but I’m the one paying the price for it.”

That criticism should not detract from “some really good law enforcement officers” in Rankin County, he said. “Any community has to have proactive patrolmen and narcotics officers to be safe.”

Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said Dedmon’s statements make it obvious that Rankin drug cases need to be reviewed for possible wrongful convictions.

“These perpetrators controlled the institution that was supposed to investigate these heinous crimes, leaving the victims no recourse,” she said. “Mercifully, post-conviction allows attorneys to look back when our institutions fail — especially when the failure is of this magnitude.”

She said her office was willing to carry out this task and would need $400,000 in extra funding from the Mississippi Legislature to hire an additional investigator and part-time lawyers to review the cases.

Matt Steffey, professor of law at Mississippi College, said prosecutors are expected to seek justice, not just convictions, and have a responsibility to examine possible wrongful convictions, “especially where the problems are as acute, profound and well documented as they are in the Goon Squad cases.”

The Mississippi attorney general’s office, which prosecuted the Goon Squad cases with the Justice Department, also has the authority to review the Goon Squad cases.

But MaryAsa Lee, its communications director, said the office wasn’t examining any cases.

Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the nonprofit Innocence Project, said the district attorney “has a constitutional and ethical obligation to notify every defendant in every conviction in which these cops played a role in the arrest or prosecution.”

That has yet to happen, according to lawyers representing some of the defendants.

Neufeld said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to disclose any evidence that might clear a defendant, even if the evidence arises after that person’s conviction.

“I’ve been involved in multiple situations where prosecutors notify hundreds of convicted defendants where there is misconduct far less egregious than that attributed to the Goon Squad,” he said.

More than a decade ago, Lane Fikes of Carthage said McAlpin snatched him out of his truck and joined other officers in beating him. “They pretty much beat up anybody,” he said. “That was their M.O. [Method of Operation].”

The next day, “I went to the emergency room,” he said. “I had cracked ribs.”

Hospital officials urged him to report it, but he said he knew if he did, he would get payback from deputies.

“As far back as I remember, you didn’t mess around in Rankin County,” he said. “If you did, something like this was going to happen.”

In 2013, a Rankin County grand jury indicted Fikes on charges of selling meth. Fikes, a Celebrate Recovery leader who has been sober since 2016, said he was addicted to meth at the time but that he wasn’t selling it.

Prosecutors kept pressuring him to plead guilty and said he would face 30 years in prison if he didn’t take the deal, he said. “They get in your head. ‘What did I do? Do they have something on me?’”

He wound up borrowing money to hire his own attorney, Beverly D. Poole, who pushed for prosecutors to share the evidence against her client, including all video and audio recordings.

After prosecutors turned over evidence, Poole told the judge that prosecutors had failed to share everything.

When she finally glimpsed the video of the drug buy, Fikes was nowhere to be seen. The judge dismissed the indictments, and Fikes walked free.

“If I had accepted their charges, I would be in prison,” he said. “How many other people have they done that to?”

Jeremy Travis Paige, who had been convicted in Hinds County of selling marijuana and receiving stolen property, said McAlpin pulled him over on Aug. 1, 2018, and knocked him out with a blow.

When he came to, “I was being dragged into my house by narcotics officers,” he recalled in his complaint to the U.S. District Court. (The incident report mentions the traffic stop but nothing about taking him to his house.)

Goon Squad officers broke into his home without a warrant after a woman sold drugs to a confidential informant and then claimed he put her up to it, he said. “I got beat down and tortured for hours. I was in handcuffs the whole time.”

Officers “tried to force me to do drug deals off my phone,” he said. Instead of setting up deals, he texted family.

At one point, Paige said McAlpin, a longtime Master Mason, saw him wearing his grandfather’s Masonic ring. “He said, ‘You don’t deserve to wear that,’ and he slapped me in the face real hard,” Paige said. “He about knocked me out.”

McAlpin swore in a statement that he never hit Paige, but extensive injuries can be seen on his face in his jail booking photograph.

Paige said it was still daylight when the beating by McAlpin and other officers began, and he wasn’t booked into the jail until 1:30 the next morning. “No human being should be treated the way I was treated that night,” he said. 

An April 2019 grand jury indicted Paige for selling meth. “I don’t see how the grand jurors indicted me when I wasn’t even there [at the drug sale],” he said. “There was no video, no audio, nothing.”

Less than a year later, he sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, McAlpin and Sheriff Bailey for the beating. Rankin County officials responded that Paige wasn’t due a dime because “qualified immunity” protected McAlpin’s actions, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

While sitting in jail, Paige rejected each plea deal until he was told if he didn’t accept the final offer, he would be prosecuted as a habitual offender and receive the maximum sentence of 80 years in prison, he said. “They threatened me with my past.”

He pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced him to five years in prison. He is now on parole.

He would like to see his case and others like his investigated for possible wrongful convictions, he said. “I’m doing time for a charge I didn’t commit. We need to see how deep the corruption goes.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Senate Finance Committee voted Thursday to advance legislation to reduce the state income tax and the sales tax on groceries while raising the gasoline tax.

Republican senators voted to advance the measure, which they say will boost economic activity in Mississippi. Democrats on the committee argued cutting the income tax while raising the gas tax would benefit corporations and harm the working poor.

The Senate plan amounts to a net tax cut of $326 million, a more modest sum than the $1.1 billion net cut passed by the House. The Senate would reduce the state’s flat 4% income tax to 2.99% over four years, a provision that’s likely to become a point of contention with the House, which has pushed for eventual full elimination of the income tax.

If Mississippi were to adopt the House plan, it would join nine other states that don’t have a state income tax. The Senate proposal to maintain the income tax but lower it to 2.99% would make Mississippi’s income tax the nation’s third-lowest, according to Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, a Republican.

Harkins, the Senate plan’s lead author, said the legislation would help Mississippi draw corporate investment and attract new residents migrating from higher-tax states.

READ MORE: House passes $1.1 billion income tax elimination-gas and sales tax increase plan in bipartisan vote

“While it may not be only tax policy, it’s tax policy coupled with regulation and things that induce people to move into the state,” he said. “But it’s part of the equation, and I think that’s the effort that we’re all trying to get here.”

The Senate proposal would also reduce the state’s 7% sales tax on grocery items, the highest in the nation, to 5% starting July 2026.

The Senate would raise the state’s 18.4-cents-a-gallon gasoline excise by three cents each year over the next three years, eventually resulting in a 27.4 cents per gallon gas tax at completion. This is an effort to help the Mississippi Department of Transportation with a long-running shortfall of highway maintenance money.

Democratic Sen. Hob Bryan said the Republican majority’s “obsession” with abolishing or lowering the income tax was being driven by out-of-state corporations and anti-tax activists such as Grover Norquist, who famously said his goal was to shrink government to the size “where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

READ MORE: Speaker White frustrated by ‘crickets’ from Senate on tax plan

“The people who are driving this, the ones who actually know what they’re doing, I’m not talking about the useful idiots,” Bryan said. “They care nothing about roads. They care nothing about water. They care nothing about sewer. They care nothing about public safety. They care nothing about public schools. What they care about is simply reducing government to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub, as an end in and of itself.”

The debate over tax policy is unfolding as Mississippi has made a push to lure technology companies to the state with generous tax incentives. Republican Sen. Daniel Sparks said the Senate plan would strengthen the state’s effort to create jobs and attract new residents.

“No, I don’t think if you go to zero income tax people are lined up at the state line ready to spring into Mississippi. I’ll concede that point to you,” Sparks said. “But good tax policy brings business, which brings jobs, which brings opportunity.”

Bryan said most people don’t choose where to live based on tax policy. He said the Senate and House tax overhauls would lead to the defunding of public services and shower benefits on corporations instead of workers.

“The tax structure in Mississippi is geared toward making life worse and worse for (the working poor) and shifting more and more of the tax burden to them,” Bryan said.

The Senate announced its plan after the House passed a plan last month that eliminates the income tax over a decade, cuts the state grocery tax and raises sales taxes and gasoline taxes.

In a bid to increase economic development, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has made the full elimination of the state income tax his central legislative priority this session.

It remains unclear if Reeves would sign a tax cut package into law that does not fully eliminate the income tax.

The Senate bill now goes to the floor for a vote before the full chamber.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Note: This editorial is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a new platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here. 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

In the United States of America, we are free to criticize government, from city hall to the White House.

This somewhat peculiar freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the bedrock of our republic, and many have argued it’s the wellhead from which all our other freedoms flow. The British Crown’s use of “sedition” laws to put down dissent is a key reason we rose up and threw that yoke, and have a First Amendment, and a country.

Someone needs to remind Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin of this fundamental of American democracy. And of a few points of law.

Martin has issued a ruling that appears so unconstitutional, so anathema to accepted jurisprudence and so un-American that she’s drawing attention and criticism nationwide and abroad.

Without even granting the newspaper a hearing, Martin issued a temporary restraining order against the Clarksdale Press Register after city officials sued. She ordered the newspaper to take down a Feb. 8 editorial “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust” from its online site and make it inaccessible to readers.

Without. A. Hearing.

The editorial criticized city of Clarksdale officials for not providing the paper notice of a meeting, and it questioned city leaders’ motives in asking the state Legislature to allow creation of a local tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.

Will they add tea?

City leaders did not like the editorial and sued, claiming it was libelous and hindered their efforts to lobby lawmakers for the tax.

Prior restraint of speech before adjudication that it is not protected has long been held unconstitutional, dating back early in U.S. law.

And besides the inherent wrongness of a Soviet-style censorship order without granting due process to the newspaper, it has also been long and widely held in U.S. law that a government cannot sue for defamation or libel.

As was noted in the case of the City of Chicago v. Tribune Co. in the early 1920s, “no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.”

But even more astounding, even if the city of Clarksdale did have the right to sue for libel, the city clerk admitted in court filings that she failed to notify the newspaper as required of the meeting.

As longtime Mississippi editor, columnist and attorney Charlie Mitchell said, there are so many things wrong with this ruling, it’s hard to know where to start.

Our nation’s founders despised and feared tyrannical government that brooks no redress from those governed or from a free press. And the people and the free press have the right to criticize government be it at Clarksdale City Hall or in Washington, D.C.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.