By Douglass Dowty
syracuse.com
MARCY, N.Y. — A defense lawyer’s last-ditch efforts Monday to spare a guard from prison for beating an inmate at a Central New York state prison fell flat.
Defense lawyer David Longeretta argued that the beaten inmate wasn’t actually vulnerable because he wasn’t physically restrained at the time.
“Wow,” Chief U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes responded.
She noted that the inmate was awakened at 1 a.m., ordered to stand against a wall and beaten by three correctional officers.
Sannes sentenced fired corrections officer Rohail Khan to two years in prison for his role in the premeditated beating of inmate James Barton on April 23, 2023, at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in Marcy.
Supervising corrections officer Brandon Montanari was previously sentenced in August to three years in prison, while a trainee, Michael Williams, was sentenced Friday to 1 3/4 years in prison by Sannes.
All three had previously pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under the color of law, a felony. They had all initially denied their roles in the beating before a cooperating corrections officer came forward.
Barton’s beating was only one in a string of horrendous prison attacks by guards at Mid-State and its neighboring prison, Marcy Correctional, in recent years.
Ten corrections officers at Mid-State were indicted earlier this year for violently beating to death inmate Messiah Nantwi in March. Months earlier, corrections officers beat to death another inmate, Robert L. Brooks, at Marcy Correctional.
And in 2016, dozens of Mid-State corrections officers brutally jumped on, kicked and sodomized inmates. A judge has ruled that the state owes monetary damages to the inmates. Many of the officers still work at the prison.
But Monday’s sentencing was notable for the number of times Khan’s lawyer pulled new arguments out of the blue.
At one point, Sannes questioned whether Longeretta knew the rules of federal court.
It wasn’t the time and place to bring up defenses for the first time, the judge noted. “That’s not how sentencings work in federal court.”
“If I didn’t put that in my (legal arguments), I apologize,” Longeretta said at one point, withdrawing a vague constitutional argument.
But his argument that the beaten inmate didn’t constitute a vulnerable person caused the biggest stir.
The inmate, Barton, wasn’t handcuffed or otherwise “mechanically restrained” at the time of the beating, Longeretta said. Barton could have defended himself, the lawyer suggested.
That wasn’t realistic, prosecutors responded.
“If he physically resisted, he could have turned a beating into a murder,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Gadarian said.
Sannes noted she didn’t have to consider Longeretta’s argument because it was raised too late in the process. But she took it up anyway and dismissed it.
In federal court, sentencings are heavily influenced by a points system that guides judges in handing out punishment. Longeretta’s arguments were designed to lessen Khan’s culpability, in the hopes of keeping him from going to prison himself for the crime.
For his part, Khan offered what the judge considered “sincere remorse,” blaming a lapse in judgment, stress of the job and influence from others for his actions.
“I know what I did was completely wrong,” Khan said in a prepared statement.
In court papers, Longeretta had argued that his client didn’t really strike or kick the inmate with enough force to hurt him. In court, he argued that Khan should only be considered a minor participant. Again, Sannes disagreed.
The facts of what happened are not in dispute: Montanari, Khan and Williams, acting together, pulled Barton out of bed in the middle of the night in a planned attack.
Barton was ordered against a wall and beaten before later being paraded around the prison and forced to announce his status as a child rapist. (Barton is serving a 10-years-to-life sentence.)
A day after, Barton was beaten again, assumedly because everyone now knew of his crime, authorities have said.
In another argument that left the judge bewildered, Khan’s lawyer argued that it was the trainee, Williams, who ordered his client to participate in the beating.
Previous court proceedings had already appeared to establish that it was Montanari, the senior officer, who orchestrated the attack.
“I’m not sure how a probationary employee would have orchestrated getting an inmate out of bed at 1 a.m. for a beating,” Sannes noted.
Despite all of the complicating factors, the judge did not appear swayed to change her mind about the sentence.
The beating was an “egregious abuse of power,” Sannes said, in sending Khan to prison for two years.
Khan, who has been free under supervision, was not taken into custody Monday, but ordered to turn himself in to begin his prison sentence by Oct. 20.
Longeretta runs his own general practice law office in Utica and was recently elected a New Hartford town justice.
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