State: Defense: Valdes, not guards, was violent

STARKE -- Prosecutors have it backward, the lawyers defending four prison guards said Wednesday at the start of a landmark trial that is expected to shine an unflattering light on the state's corrections system.

The guards, accused of second-degree murder and other offenses, were not angry at Frank Valdes, the attorneys said. They did not beat him without mercy and dump him in a cell "like a sack of potatoes," as one prosecutor put it.

It was the other way around, the attorneys said: It was Valdes who was goading the guards to fight, Valdes who was the thug on a hot July morning in 1999 when tensions were high in the stale, un-cooled air of Florida State Prison.

In fact, the attorneys told the jury in opening statements, it was the guards who were nervous and frightened by the prospect of having to enter and search the cell of Valdes, a death row inmate with a conviction for killing a corrections officer and history of violence and escape attempts.

It didn't matter, they said, that the 5-foot-7, 150-pound Valdes was dressed in boxers while the guards, most of them weighing more than 200 pounds, were outfitted in their "battle dress uniforms" of helmets, face shields and heavily padded black suits, and had an electronic shield to stun the inmate. When Valdes threatened an officer as he did the day before his death, "Everybody in that institution pays attention because he's (hurt guards) before, he's perfectly capable and he'll do it again," Ted Curtis, one of four defense attorneys, told the jury.

The guards did all they could to get out of it -- cajoling Valdes and hesitating at length before a "cell extraction team" finally entered.

Jurors also heard two wholly different interpretations of what prison guard Raymon Hanson will say when he takes the stand sometime during the six-week trial as one of the state's star witnesses.

Prosecutors say Hanson, the 6-foot-5, 310-pound guard who led the extraction team and held the shield, will testify that Valdes was cowering in a fetal position and offered little resistance when the guards entered the cell. Overcome by chemicals sprayed in the cell earlier, Hanson left and returned to find officers beating Valdes, including defendant Sgt. Charles A. Brown, who "was kicking him like a football."

The defense's version: Hanson not only botched the extraction by zapping his fellow officers with the shield, he deserted them, and for that should be discredited. And Valdes was not in a fetal position, Curtis told the jury. He was "like a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike."

Said Gloria Fletcher, another defense attorney: "That cell is full and Frank Valdes is kicking, he is fighting . . . and he's got a weapon." Fletcher was referring to a grenade filled with chemicals that failed to go off when thrown into Valdes' cell earlier.

For all the dramatic talk of the cell extraction, however, prosecutors said they think Valdes actually died after a beating later that afternoon, but State Attorney Greg McMahon provided few details of that confrontation.

The defense spent much of Wednesday planting the strong suggestion that Valdes was beaten, not by the four guards on trial, but by Sgt. Montrez Lucas, one of four other ex-guards scheduled to stand trial later this year in Valdes' death. It was either a beating by Lucas, the lawyers said, or Valdes caused his own death by throwing himself repeatedly off his bunk and climbing the bars of his cell only to let himself fall backward on the concrete floor.

One fact that will go undisputed in the trial is that Valdes, 36, suffered massive injuries: a broken nose; a jaw broken in two places; a broken collar bone, shoulder and sternum; 22 broken ribs; and four broken vertebrae. Boot marks were visible on his neck and abdomen.

"His chest is so injured that he could not take a breath," McMahon told the jury, rejecting the defense's notion that the inmate inflicted his own injuries. "Once you've seen the body of Frank Valdes, once you've seen those injuries documented . . . you will know that Frank Valdes was beaten to death."

Besides Brown, on trial are Capt. Timothy A. Thornton, Sgt. Jason P. Griffis and Sgt. Andrew W. Lewis. All are charged with second-degree murder, conspiring to batter Valdes and felony battery on an inmate. All but Lewis are charged with official misconduct for allegedly altering reports to sanitize their confrontations with Valdes.

All four have been fired.

According to both the prosecution and defense, the trouble began July 16, 1999, when Valdes became angry that another inmate was not getting his medication. By some accounts, he also had been angry about the recent alleged beatings of other inmates.

Lucas, who is black, told Valdes to mind his own business and tempers flared. When Valdes, who was white, let loose with a string of racial slurs and threatened to kill Lucas, Lucas filed a report.

The threat prompted Thornton to order a search of Valdes' cell the next day, but Valdes refused to place his hands through a cell door opening so they could be cuffed.

Thornton tried several times to get him to "cuff up" but Valdes refused, defense attorneys said. Thornton sprayed the cell with gas, which didn't faze Valdes. Then he threw a grenade in the cell, but it didn't go off.

"(Valdes) is in charge of that cell now," Fletcher said. "Capt. Thornton has no choice but to put together an extraction team."

After the rough-and-tumble morning extraction, Valdes was bruised and bleeding from the lip but far from death's door, say the guards, including Hanson.

Valdes was taken to the prison clinic, where a nurse pronounced him fit to return to X-wing, a cell block reserved for the state's most difficult prisoners.

There, Thornton saw him about 2 p.m. flinging himself around his cell.

"He screams at him, 'Are you okay, Valdes? Are you okay?"' Fletcher told the jury. Valdes said he was fine, according to Thornton.

At 3:15 p.m., Valdes was found beaten, cold and wet in his cell.

Prison nurses could tell he was dead. Lewis and Brown continued CPR.

McMahon, the prosecutor, said inmates will testify they heard the sounds of fists hitting skin that afternoon before Valdes was found.

"They went to tune him up to teach him a lesson," McMahon said. And "things got out of hand."

Even if jurors don't believe the guards beat Valdes, they should consider that the guards should have protected him from himself, McMahon said.

"To abandon him in that cell," he said, "was tantamount to letting him be murdered."

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk