No Charges in Alabama Prisoner’s Torture, Rape and Murder
Terry Williams, the father of a murdered Alabama prisoner, was reportedly left “speechless” in late October 2024 after an Elmore County grand jury refused to indict his son’s alleged attacker, another prisoner identified as “X.” Just a year earlier, Daniel Terry Williams, 22, was brutally tortured and raped over several days at Staton Correctional Facility, his body even “rented out” to other prisoners to rape, too; he died at a hospital a week later, on November 9, 2023, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2024, p.12.]
Williams was nearing release from a one-year sentence for theft when his unconscious body was found on the bed in “X’s” cell. In a fiery December 2023 address to state lawmakers, Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Carla Crowder noted that “X,” 38, had been involved in nine other attacks over the previous six years in which fellow prisoners were sexually assaulted and stabbed. But there was no documentation of any disciplinary action by the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
In fact, Crowder noted, “X” had “a five-year clear record of institutional violence, which resulted in a perfect score of zero in risk assessment conducted in October [2023], and a total score low enough for him to be placed in medium security in an open bay dorm. The psych associates signed off on this and the warden signed off on this.”
Instead, guards wrote up “X” and his victims on an “Enemies Report”—effectively assuming that any sexual activity had been consensual, at least to start. What no one will say is why DOC staffers repeatedly turned a blind eye when allegations of abuse by “X” persisted. However, that sort of deference is often reserved for incarcerated informants.
Williams’ family has hired Washington, D.C. attorney Andrew Menefee, who said he plans to file a civil rights suit on their behalf. The federal Department of Justice has also sued the state and its DOC for running prisons “riddled with prisoner-on-prisoner and guard-on-prisoner violence,” as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2021, p.34.] That suit is headed to trial.
Meanwhile, the state is pressing forward with construction of a new “mega-prison,” which will be named in honor of Gov. Kay Ivey (R). Making that announcement on November 13, 2024, spokeswoman Gina Maiola said that there was “no governor in Alabama’s history who has done more to improve the state’s corrections system.”
Incredibly, Maiola apparently managed to keep a straight face, too.
Sources: Alabama Reflector, Birmingham News, Moth to Flame
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