By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer
WICHITA FALLS, Texas- After hearing nearly four weeks of testimony, jurors began their first full day of deliberations Tuesday in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by a gay inmate who says he was repeatedly raped by prison gangs while corrections workers refused to help him.
Six Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees are accused of showing deliberate indifference in failing to protect Roderick Keith Johnson, and of violating the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The jury started deliberations Monday, spending about two hours on the case, and resumed Tuesday.
Johnson was sold as a sex slave by gangs during his 18 months at the Allred Unit near Wichita Falls, while prison officials never investigated his reports of abuse or moved him to a safer area, his attorneys said Monday in closing arguments.
Johnson, 37, spent nearly four years in prison after violating the terms of his probation from a 10-year sentence for burglarizing a house. He is seeking unspecified damages from assistant warden Richard Wathen, four corrections officers and an administrative technician.
“Being violently assaulted in prison is simply not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society,” said his lead attorney, Margaret Winter, who is associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.
But David A. Harris of the Texas Attorney General’s Office, representing the defendants, said there was no proof of the rapes and that Johnson lied under oath about several things. Johnson testified he had not used cocaine in several months, but his parole officer testified that after failing a drug test Johnson admitted taking drugs in recent weeks.
“Somebody’s lying to you, and who’s got the most motivation?” Harris said during his closing arguments, saying Johnson wrote a letter telling his lover they would get money from his lawsuit.
The defendants and other prison employees testified that they followed procedures in considering Johnson’s claims and in denying his requests for transfer. They said Johnson usually seemed upbeat.