Former D.C. Guard Gets 42-Month Sentence for Assaulting Handcuffed Prisoner
by Douglas Ankney
On June 28, 2024, former District of Columbia (D.C.) Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Marcus Bias, 28, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison and 24 months of supervised release for assaulting a handcuffed prisoner. The sentence follows his guilty plea in March 2024 to one count of deprivation of rights under color of law.
Surveillance video captured the entire incident, which unfolded at the D.C. Jail on June 12, 2019. It began when a prisoner identified as “J.W.” refused a guard’s order to return to his cell from the dining hall and began using a phone there instead. Bias, who was then 23 and had been on the job 18 months, arrived with other members of an Emergency Response Team, pepper-spraying and handcuffing the prisoner. That’s when Bias “intentionally and without provocation” pushed him head-first into a metal doorframe, “causing serious injuries” that required hospital treatment, court documents recalled.
DOC fired Bias after reviewing the video. But he wasn’t charged and arrested until November 2022. Pastor Cheryl Mitchell Gaines wrote the federal court for the District of Columbia that her parishioner “was the youngest one there … and now he’s the fall guy.”
But D.C.’s U.S. Attorney, Matthew M. Graves, said that Bias violated his oath “when he pushed the head of a handcuffed inmate in his care into a metal doorframe.” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division agreed that those “held inside our jails and prisons should never be subject to [this] kind of violent and unjustified assault.”
Bias faced a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release, plus a fine of up to $250,000. In addition to much-shorter terms of imprisonment and supervision, he was also assessed just $100. See: United States v. Bias, USDC (D.D.C.), Case No. 1:22-cr-00380. The victim has since died of unrelated causes.
Additional source: Washington Post