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Barry Maddox, a spokesman for the FBI’s Baltimore office, said agents are looking into whether Raymond K. Smoot’s rights were violated when he was beaten during a brawl over the weekend. The state Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled Smoot’s death a homicide.
The FBI investigation began Wednesday and is running concurrently with another by the state police, city prosecutors and internal investigators from the state public safety department. The state investigation has resulted in six correctional officers being placed on administrative leave.
Yesterday’s announcement provided Smoot’s family with increased hope that they will find out what happened Saturday night inside the state-run facility.
“Federal investigators tend to nitpick and they tend to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb,” said Kenya Kelly, Smoot’s 34-year-old daughter. “I feel like everything is going to come out.”
Officials at the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said they appreciated the federal assistance.
Tuesday, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for a federal investigation, saying FBI involvement was needed to force change at the troubled facility. Central Booking has been criticized recently for failure to promptly process arrested suspects, crowding and alleged inhumane living conditions.
Smoot, who had been arrested May 3 on charges of theft and failure to appear in court, was awaiting trial. He got into an altercation Saturday evening with correctional officers after he refused to return to his cell.
After the altercation, Smoot was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was photographed with a swollen, purple face; he died there the next day. The state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and Commissioner William J. Smith of the state Division of Pretrial Detention and Services has called the beating “egregious.”
Two correctional officers who witnessed the fatal beating told their union that Smoot started the brawl by hitting an officer and was stomped, kicked and punched in retaliation. Herbert Berry Jr., a union official, said certain officers “went too far” when subduing Smoot.
A. Dwight Pettit, an attorney representing some of Smoot’s family, said he has gathered accounts from inmates who say Smoot never struck an officer.
Pettit also said that inmate witnesses claim to have been threatened by correctional officers, something he hopes will be curtailed by the FBI’s involvement.
“It will lend itself to people having faith they will not be in danger of being harmed,” he said.
A state public safety spokesman declined to comment about allegations of correctional officers intimidating witnesses.
The FBI’s involvement does not mean that a criminal case against correctional officers would land in federal court.
After FBI agents collect sufficient information on the case, including interviews and documents, Maddox said, they will present their findings to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore.
Vickie LeDuc, a spokeswoman for Maryland U.S. Attorney Allen F. Loucks, said federal prosecutors in Maryland and Washington will then decide the next step: whether to prosecute criminally in federal court, to recommend prosecution in state court, or to refer the matter for a civil action. It is also possible to take no action, she added.
After allegations of law enforcement abuse, federal investigations are not uncommon. Last month, the FBI announced agents had opened a civil-rights investigation into the Baltimore Police Department’s fatal shooting last month of a driver whom officers started chasing because they believed he was speeding.
But nationally, such investigations rarely lead to indictments, according to an independent group tracking the performance of federal law enforcement agencies.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University analyzed the Justice Department figures from the first quarter of 2004 and found that prosecutors declined to file official misconduct violations in almost every case they reviewed.
Of the 230 cases referred to prosecutors, all but three cases were declined for prosecution, according to TRAC.
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Sun staff writer Gus G. Sentementes contributed to this article.