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The videos show a brutal assault: In December, New York corrections officers beat, kicked and choked a handcuffed Robert Brooks, 43, inside the medical unit at Marcy Correctional Facility, near Syracuse. Hours later, he died from his injuries, authorities said.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James quickly released the officers’ body camera footage, which went viral — and not just in the U.S. Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered more than a dozen employees to be fired.
But firing New York prison guards is neither quick nor easy. A 2023 investigation by The Marshall Project found that between 2010 and the spring of 2022, the corrections department tried to fire guards for abusing prisoners or covering it up in nearly 300 cases — but successfully terminated the officer only 10% of the time. There are two main ways officers accused of abuse retain their jobs, our reporting found. First, the department settled many cases for lesser punishments or dismissed charges. Second, under the correctional officers’ union contract with the state, they can appeal their firings to an outside arbitrator. Of the nearly 140 appeals we examined, arbitrators gave 75% of officers their jobs back.
In a rare public rebuke, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the prisons commissioner have called for the termination of the employees accused of involvement in Brooks’ death. But neither official has the power to fire them. The guards’ union contract gives the final say to the arbitrators, a system that former prison leaders and lawmakers say hurts accountability.
Unlike many prison assaults, where evidence is scant or hidden, body cameras caught Brooks’ final moments on Dec. 9, allowing people to see a world seldom observed by outsiders. Civil rights advocates and law enforcement experts universally condemned the beating, which was played on network television and cast a rare national spotlight onto New York’s violent correctional system. Details about why Brooks was handcuffed and beaten are not publicly known. Several officers involved had been sued in the past by prisoners accusing them of similar attacks — and those officers have denied wrongdoing in those past cases.
Officials had been alerted to violence and other problems at Marcy. But the public release of video from inside New York prisons is incredibly rare. If a beating does come to light, it’s usually years later. When James made the video public less than three weeks after Brooks’ death, the urgency and severity of the situation was undeniable. James has used her authority to investigate in-custody deaths, which was granted in 2021, to publish footage of officer-involved deaths to increase transparency. Brooks was the 46th case with video released by James and the first involving prison guards.
Three weeks after Brooks’ death, and three days after the video was released, Hochul visited Marcy prison to announce a new warden, a more stringent body camera policy and a speed-up of body camera acquisition. She also called for prosecutors to quickly charge and arrest the officers. Brooks, who was Black, was handcuffed; the guards all appear to be White. No one has been charged.
Some advocates for criminal justice reform see this as a major opening for change in a system where past efforts have failed. This week, a group of legislators signed a letter calling on other lawmakers and Hochul to close Marcy prison and support systemic prison reform.
So far, one officer named in the Brooks beating has resigned; the department has suspended 15 other guards and two nurses without pay and issued them formal notices of termination.
If the employees appeal their firings, the arbitration hearings would resemble a trial. The state and the union present evidence and witnesses, and the arbitrator decides the guard’s guilt or innocence and any disciplinary sanction. As a result of our investigation, we found that the median time from when the department tried to fire a guard for abuse to the end of arbitration was more than eight months.
This disciplinary system heavily favors guards, and remains in place despite repeated efforts at change. Citing our reports, New York state Sen. Julia Salazar filed a bill last year to give the prison commissioner final say to fire officers in serious misconduct cases, which includes excessive force, smuggling contraband and sexual abuse of prisoners. The legislation stalled; it was very similar to changes that Gov. Andrew Cuomo unsuccessfully pushed in 2018.
Meanwhile, the corrections department has yet to use a new tool designed to more thoroughly examine serious charges. A 2019 addition to the union contract mandates a three-person panel — an arbitrator and representatives from the state and union — to decide cases of serious misconduct. The change was supposed to make it easier to fire bad officers. Hochul’s office renegotiated a new union contract last year mandating the panels. A spokesperson for the state’s civil service department said they are still working with the union to establish them.
It’s unclear how officers accounted for their actions at Marcy the night Brooks was beaten. The medical examiner’s preliminary findings indicate Brooks died by asphyxiation; the final autopsy report is not complete. Guards must file official reports after every use of force on a prisoner. The reports on this case have not been released. But our previous reporting found that guards often work in groups to conceal violent assaults by lying to investigators and on official reports. Some officers then file charges against their victims and send them to solitary confinement.
At least three of the officers implicated in Brooks’ death have been sued by prisoners accusing them of similar attacks. In one case, Adam Bauer alleged a group of guards, including one accused in the Brooks case, beat him bloody in a bathroom at Marcy prison in 2020 and then lied about how Bauer was injured. The prison department deemed the force necessary and did not discipline the officers, Bauer’s lawyer told us.
This pattern fits with our review of more than 160 excessive force lawsuits in which the state was ordered or agreed to pay money damages. We found officials attempted to discipline an officer in just 20 of those cases.
In three death lawsuits, the state paid the families more than $1 million but never disciplined the officers accused. The family of Karl Taylor, a prisoner at Sullivan Correctional Facility, filed a lawsuit alleging guards had beaten him to death in 2015. The state settled for $5 million and agreed to install cameras at the prison. Prison officials never filed disciplinary actions against any of the officers involved. A grand jury declined to indict the guards on criminal charges in that case.
The criminal investigation into Brooks’ death is now in the hands of the Onondaga County district attorney.
Earlier this month, Hochul expressed frustration that no arrests have been made. “The video of this horrific attack demonstrates that crimes clearly were committed,” Hochul said in a statement. “The family of Mr. Brooks deserves no further delays.”
