A lawsuit has been filed against Mid-State Correctional Facility officials, correction officers and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision commissioner over the death of Messiah Nantwi, 22, earlier this year.
The law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel said Tuesday that its federal suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York on behalf of Nantwi's estate. Nantwi, according to an indictment of correction officers charged in the case, was pronounced dead on March 1 at Wynn Hospital in Utica after beatings by correction officers at Mid-State.
The officers connected to the death are already facing criminal charges, but this civil lawsuit looks to take aim at the problematic system that allowed something like this to happen.
“We in New York state should not live in a state where people are murdered by correction officers in our state prisons,” Katie Rosenfeld, who represents the Nantwi Family, said. “Our state prisons should be a place where people are kept in safe custody.”
The Nantwi family is hoping to prove that violence at the hands of corrections officers runs rampant in New York state prisons.
“That is a systemic problem, and it’s going to require legislative changes and cultural changes in prisons,” Rosenfeld said.
The hope is that this lawsuit will spark some of those changes.
The complaint not only names the corrections officers charged in Nantwi’s death, but the Departments of Corrections Commissioner and Mid-State’s superintendent as well, claiming they were aware of the abuse and assaults on incarcerated individuals, and yet did nothing about it.
“There is a problem of excessive force by officers, and that problem has been known to DOCCS and the people who run it for many, many years, and they haven’t taken adequate steps to address it,” Rosenfeld said.
The complaint details other failures to prevent brutality, including a lack of required stationary security cameras and lax requirements for body-worn cameras. Rosenfeld says this allows abuse to go unseen and unchecked, which could have contributed to an alleged coverup in Nantwi’s death.
“This lawsuit is an attempt to really go broader and think about how are these prisons being run and supervised,” Rosenfeld explained, “And how can it be that the people who work there day to day think this is something they can get away with, or somehow acceptable?”
Nantwi’s father, Patterson, hopes this lawsuit will bring forth justice, accountability and change.
"The loss of my son Messiah is a pain no parent should ever endure. He was loved by many, and he deserved to be treated with dignity and respect - not brutally beaten while handcuffed and defenseless by those whose job it was to protect him," said Patterson Nantwi, Messiah's father, in a statement from the law firm.
Nantwi’s family is also seeking compensatory damages from this suit.
Criminal cases are ongoing against multiple correction officers connected to the death; one accepted a guilty plea to hindering prosecution and falsifying business records in late May. Others, meanwhile, have rejected plea deals while taking more time to consider them.
