“It never ends,” began Nsombi Lambright-Haynes during an exclusive discussion with NewsOne about Mississippi’s Goon Squad members, Brett McAlpin, who filed a notice of appeal this week despite having plead guilty to torturing two Black men, his attorney Aafram Sellers reported. Lambright-Haynes is the executive director of Mississippi OneVoice, a civil and human rights organization born in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
In August of 2023, McAlpin along with five other members of the Goon Squad pleaded guilty in federal court to more than 15 felonies, among them civil rights conspiracy, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.
McAlpin was sentenced to 27.5 years in federal prison. Also convicted of multiple state charges, the judge overseeing that case allowed the state time to run concurrently with the federal time. It was a gift, one rarely enough afforded Black defendants who face federal and state time–the years of which run wild–or consecutively.
But McAlpin, known to be the long-serving, defacto leader of a rotating pack of cops whose moniker was Confederate flag and a noose. McAlpin was also the ranking officer at the scene where Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker were subjected to multiple and racially motivated forms of brutal torture on Jan. 24, 2023 by six of the Goons. McAlpin was responsible for rallying them all to action that night.
The Goon Squad–widely known to be cops who would use any kind of excessive force against people–burst into Ms. Kristi Walley’s Rankin County home where Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Parker were visiting. Rankin County, a largely white area of Mississippi just east of the state’s capital, Jackson, where the population is largely Black.
The Goons had been called by a white neighbor whose name has not been revealed. In an eerie moment reminiscent of Emmett Till’s…
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