LOUISIANA
Federal judge on Tuesday sentenced three former Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office officials for abusing inmates, according to officials.
The three former officials include former lieutenant colonel.
Former Lt. Col. Gerald Savoy was sentenced to serve seven years and three months in prison; Wesley Hayes, the former Warden of the Iberia Parish Jail, was sentenced to serve two years and 10 months; and Hayes’ brother Jesse, a former Assistant Warden at the jail, was sentenced to serve two years.
The convictions of these three defendants and seven others who were sentenced in February stemmed from several incidents of abuse at the Iberia Parish Jail in 2011.
During the course of an expansive investigation, 10 former jail officials pleaded guilty to federal criminal civil rights violations.
During their guilty plea hearings, the officials admitted to various incidents in which deputies willfully assaulted inmates, without legal justification for doing so.
One of those incidents, including the incident to which Savoy and the Hayes brothers pled guilty, involved the abuse of a pretrial detainee in September 2011.
A second incident to which numerous deputies pled guilty occurred at the jail on April 29, 2011, when five pretrial detainees were taken into a chapel at the jail and were beaten by sheriff’s deputies.
The seven other defendants, who were sentenced previously for their roles in these civil rights offenses are the following officials:
- Former Lt. Bret Broussard of the Narcotics Unit, who was sentenced to 54 months in prison
- Former narcotics agent Wade Bergeron, who was sentenced to 48 months in prison
- Former narcotics agent Jason Comeaux, who was sentenced to 40 months in prison
- Former narcotics agent David Hines, who was sentenced to 40 months in prison
- Former narcotics agent Byron Benjamin Lassalle, who was sentenced to 54 months in prison
- Former K-9 handlers Robert Burns and Jeremy Hatley, who were sentenced to six months in prison and 36 months in prison respectively.
An additional deputy, former Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office Capt. Mark Frederick has been indicted and is pending trial.
Sheriff Louis Ackal, who was also charged in connection with the cases, was acquitted at a trial in November 2016.