JACKSON, Miss. — A former police officer from Mississippi got a year in federal prison on Wednesday for making a man he had arrested lick pee off the floor of a jail cell.
As a misdemeanor, Michael Christian Green was charged with acting under the color of law to strip someone of their civil rights. He got the maximum prison sentence possible. Green, who is 26 years old, pleaded guilty on March 14 and is due to start jail on July 26.
Green was fired from his job as a police officer for the Pearl Police Department at the end of December, four days after the violent incident in Pearl, a suburb of Jackson, which is the capital city.
The court papers didn’t say anything about race, but Green is white and a Pearl City representative said the man he arrested is Latino. According to the charges, Green arrested the guy on December 23 after a fight at a store.
A court document says that security video from the police department showed that the man tried to tell Green that he had to go to the bathroom while he was in a holding cell. It said that the man went to the back of the cell and urinated in a corner after waiting for a while.
The man who was arrested is only named by his initials, B.E., in the court record. Green said he would hit B.E. with a phone, which was caught on camera.
The paper said that Green put the man back in his cell and told him to “suck it up” while he licked his urine on the ground. Green then used his phone to record B.E. while the man did this. According to the paper, Green told the man, “Don’t spit it out,” after he had been choked several times.
In a statement, the city of Pearl said that they found out about the “disturbing event” over the Christmas weekend and hired a private attorney to start a probe. Mayor Jake Windham said Green quit on December 27.
Windham said Green had been with the Pearl Police Department for about six months after working for other Jackson-area police departments.
When police officers in Mississippi are charged with violence, it doesn’t happen very often, but every year there are a few cases of officers shooting people.
Six white former police officers, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad,” were sentenced this year on federal and state charges after pleading guilty to attacking two Black men in January 2023 because of their race. Pearl is in Rankin County.
Source: Yahoo News