Former L.A. Sheriff’s Deputy
(Photo: ABC News LA)
LOS ANGELES – The seventh and last deputy in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who was convicted of obstruction of a civil rights investigation into misconduct at the Men’s Central Jail was sentenced this morning to 18 months in federal prison, officials said.
During the sentencing, U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson told James Sexton, 30, that he “lost the courage to stand up when he knew things were wrong.”
After his case was severed from the other six defendants in the case, officials said Sexton was found guilty in September of attempting to quash an investigation by the FBI into civil rights abuses at jail facilities operated by the Sheriff’s Department.
The jury determined that Sexton was part of a broad conspiracy to obstruct justice – a plot in which conspirators, including two lieutenants, attempted to influence witnesses, threatened an FBI agent with arrest and concealed an FBI informant who should have been turned over to federal authorities.
Sexton was found guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.
The conspiracy to obstruct justice began in the summer of 2011 after sheriff’s deputies assigned to the Men’s Central Jail learned that a jail inmate was an FBI informant and was acting as a cooperator in a federal investigation into corruption and civil rights violations at the jail.
Subsequently, 18 current and former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies were arrested in December 2013 on suspicion of civil rights and corruption violations, federal authorities said.
The arrests stem from a two-year federal probe into corruption and inmate abuse within the Los Angeles County jail system, according to officials.
Following the 2013 arrests, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca resigned in January 2014.
The FBI’s inmate informant Anthony Brown was at the heart of a widespread civil rights scandal overshadowing the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Brown claims he was moved to different jails and hidden in cars to keep him from talking to his FBI handlers.
Brown told KABC-TV that he was kidnapped by deputies, held in isolation and watched around the clock so that federal agents wouldn’t be able to contact their chief whistleblower in a massive investigation that has led to 20 arrests within the country’s biggest sheriff’s office.
“I’m supposed to be a criminal,” Brown told KABC-TV in an exclusive interview in May 2014. But “these are people that are sworn to uphold the law.”
Brown had been sentenced to 423 years for a long series of violent robberies when he contacted the FBI about abuse and corruption at the downtown Men’s Central Jail, which is run by the sheriff’s department, according to KABC-TV.
“Those cops in L.A. were crooked. (There was) a whole bunch of things going on — the drug selling, beating up the inmates, setting up the fights,” the inmate said in an interview with KABC.
The evidence showed that the defendants learned that the inmate received a cellular phone from a deputy sheriff who took a bribe and that the inmate was part of a federal civil rights investigation, officials said.
Those involved in the obstruction hid the cooperator from the FBI and the U.S.Marshals Service, which were attempting to bring the inmate into federal custody as ordered by a federal judge. As part of the conspiracy, records were altered to make it appear as if the cooperator had been released, but he was re-booked under different names, authorities said.
The jury heard evidence that Sexton, who was part of a gang intelligence unit called Operation Safe Jails or OSJ, changed the name of the informant and his booking number in the jail computer system, which allowed members of the conspiracy to hide the informant from the FBI.
Officials said Sexton’s lieutenant “called him into the OSJ office and asked defendant Sexton to use his expertise in navigating the archaic LASD computer system to help [hide the informant] from the federal authorities,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing document.
“Defendant knew he was being asked to become an essential part of a criminal plan. Defendant knew that he would be taking part in wrongdoing, and, as the conspiracy progressed, he knew time after time that the actions he took and those taken by his co-conspirators were wrong and illegal,” the document stated.
Sexton will begin serving his sentence in February.
Six co-conspirators who were tried separated were found guilty of obstruction of justice and other charges earlier. They were sentenced in September to federal terms of up to three years and five months.