State: 3 prison guards acquitted

STARKE -- A courtroom in this prison-dominated town of 6,000 erupted with joyous tears and hugs Friday as three former corrections officers were acquitted on all charges in the 1999 stomping death of inmate Frank Valdes.

"We're just elated," Capt. Timothy Thornton said amid bear hugs from friends and family.

Despite the undisputed fact that Valdes was severely beaten, his chest crushed so badly that he suffocated, prosecutors were hard-pressed to bring the moment of his death into clear focus. They produced 51 witnesses and placed stacks of documents into evidence, but none of it pinpointed which guards brought the blows that killed Valdes.

The only other five officers who had access to Valdes that afternoon in July 1999 still face charges. But prosecutors Friday night said they would have to determine whether to proceed with that trial.

"The officers were just doing their jobs, and the jury saw that," said Gloria Fletcher, Thornton's attorney. "I said the day they were arrested that it was a travesty of justice and now, 11/2 years later, after Timmy Thornton has lost his home, his car, his health insurance, everything, we're back to square one."

The charged guards were fired by the Department of Corrections after the Valdes death. And Thornton has learned he needs a kidney transplant.

His mother, Carolyn Thornton, said of the verdict, "It's the Lord's blessing. I knew my boy wouldn't do something like that. Maybe he can get a kidney. He lost everything he had because of this."

Others saw the verdict as testament to how tough it is to prosecute guards in a community where the economy is driven by prisons.

"How on earth can you get a fair trial where everybody's a guard or related to guards? You can't do it," Valdes' widow, Wanda Valdes, said tearfully by phone after the verdict.

Jurors had been asked to wade through a complex maze of evidence, including testimony by eight prison inmates that even prosecutors acknowledged had credibility problems.

The three guards -- Thornton, 36; Charles A. Brown, 28, and Jason P. Griffis, 28 -- were charged with 15 different crimes and the trial took four weeks.

But the jury took only 31/2 hours to reach a decision: These guards, at least, did not murder Valdes or refuse to help him as he died in his cell from what doctors said was an obvious stomping. Nor, they concluded, did the guards commit felony battery that morning when they "extracted" him from his cell. Nor did they falsify their reports to escape blame, the jury found.

That's not to say they didn't believe corrections officers killed the 36-year-old Valdes. Even some defense attorneys suggested guards must have killed him -- just not their clients.

"The martians didn't kill him," said retired electrician Richard Stolze, an alternate juror who heard all the testimony but did not participate in the deliberations.

Rose Sewell, another alternate juror, agreed murder occurred in Florida State Prison, but she would have voted for full acquittals.

"Somebody killed him," she said. "I haven't the foggiest idea (who did)."

Hank Coxe, another defense lawyer, said prosecutors were stymied by initially contending that Valdes suffered his fatal injuries when yanked from his cell in the morning. Faced with medical testimony that Valdes was okay after that cell extraction, they shifted gears more than a year later to say officers fatally beat Valdes that afternoon.

"They got caught in their own internal problems. Instead of reviewing whether those . . . people should be charged with murder, they just added more charges," Coxe said, suggesting prosecutors should drop the charges against the other officers.

"Unless the quality of their case is different from what I've seen in the last month and half, I'd be surprised if they pursued those (other officers)," Coxe said.

Prosecutor Greg McMahon said the location of the crime and the difficulty getting witnesses to come forward posed a big obstacle. So did the jury pool in Bradford County, he said, though he acknowledged that prosecutors approved the jurors.

"I do think even the defense concluded that Valdes was killed by correctional officers on X wing, and that is something that this community has to take with it," McMahon said.

Just before leaving the courthouse to celebrate, an ebullient Griffis scoffed at the prosecution as politically motivated. "There wasn't any justice to this," he said. "They wasted the taxpayers' dollars.

Asked who he thought killed Valdes, Griffis shrugged: "I have no idea."

The officers' union, the Police Benevolent Association, says it spent about $750,000 defending them. They hired some of the area's top defense lawyers, whose strategy was two-fold: attack the credibility of inmate witnesses and shift the blame to the guards who have yet to stand trial.

"Corrections officers form a thin line of law enforcement to protect us from society's worst and most violent people. . . . But like any profession there's mostly good and some bad," Brown's lawyer, Ted C. Curtis, told jurors Friday morning. Motioning toward to the defendants, he added, "These are the good guys."

Thornton's attorney, Fletcher, laid photos of the inmate witnesses on the jury box rail. "There is your reasonable doubt," she told them.

Most of the inmates were serving life sentences for violent crimes including murder, attempted murder and armed robbery. Most of them had taken the stand in prison jump suits and shackles that clanked across the courtroom floor. Some were openly hostile to defense lawyers, including one who folded his arms and refused to answer more questions.

The decision marks the second acquittal stemming the Valdes' death. Another Bradford County jury found former prison guard Montrez Lucas not guilty of aggravated battery in an October 2000 trial.

Throughout the prison system, Valdes became a symbol for how often abuse goes on behind bars. Corrections officials have consistently called the case an isolated one, but inmate advocates insist otherwise. Many were closely watching the trial.

Said Lisa Shirley White, a Gainesville attorney who frequently represents inmates, "If they're not convicted of this crime -- when somebody clearly beat him to death and they were the ones with access to him -- it's just going to reinforce the idea among prison guards that they can get away with anything."

Most of the trial spectators, though, were firmly on the side of the officers. Norman Traylor watched the testimony intently day after day, and then phoned relatives to give reports. Traylor's cousin was Fred Griffis, the corrections officer Valdes killed in 1987 to wind up on death row.

"It's overwhelming, the emotions," Traylor said after the verdict. "I was extremely worried that more lives would be affected by that individual."

- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Lucy Morgan

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