Two Denver deputy sheriffs are being accused of brutally assaulting a man while he lay in a hospital bed at Denver Health after suffering from a severe mental health episode.
Brandon Walton alleged in a lawsuit that, after he was arrested, deputy sheriffs Alexander Jamsa and Casey Meyer punched him in the face three times after he suffered involuntary muscle spasms. The two officers were assigned to guard Walton while he received medical care for what medical professionals suspected was a case of psychosis. The punches left Walton with a broken nose and a concussion.
The lawsuit was filed on January 2 in Colorado’s district court.
“This is another instance in a long history of Denver sheriffs and Denver Police Officers using force on those who are vulnerable and those who don’t deserve to have force used on them,” Walton’s lawyer, Raymond Bryant, a civil rights attorney with the Civil Rights Litigation Group in Denver, told Colorado Times Recorder in an interview.
A Denver Sheriff’s Office spokesperson told Colorado Times Recorder that the agency “does not discuss pending litigation.”
Walton was initially arrested in December 2022 after allegedly attempting to enter other people’s apartments in the same complex that he lived in. Officers recognized that Walton was suffering from a mental health episode at the time of his arrest and transported him to Denver Health for an evaluation, according to the lawsuit. The next day, Walton was transferred to the medical unit at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center.
During his stay at the detention center, Walton disconnected his catheter from its bag, which required officers to transfer him back to Denver Health for further treatment. Jamsa and Meyer were assigned to watch Walton while he was in the hospital.
Walton fell asleep for about 90 minutes after the doctor’s reconnected his catheter. When he woke up, Walton was disoriented and did not know where he was, according to the lawsuit. He tried to get out of bed, but his muscles spasmed uncontrollably.
“The spasming did not appear to be an intentional effort to threaten or cause harm to anyone,” the lawsuit states.
In response, one of the officers punched Walton three times in the face while the other looked on, even though he did not try to resist or evade the officers, according to the lawsuit. The officers allegedly did not give Walton any verbal commands or the opportunity to comply with them.
Even though Bryant and his team are early in their investigation into the incident, he said they have some significant issues.
First, there is no body-worn camera footage of the incident, even though Colorado’s police accountability law requires police officers to activate them during “any interaction with the public.”
The officers also did not file a use-of-force report with the police department after the incident despite department policy requiring them to do so, Bryant said.
To Bryant, these issues suggest Denver has “very poor police training practices.”
“Officers should only be using force if there is a threat of force against them or others, and yet it appears to be the first tool they go to,” Bryant said.
The lawsuit was filed when the Denver law enforcement agencies are under increased scrutiny for their officers’ actions. Over the last several years, the city has paid more than $40 million in settlements related to its officers’ conduct.
Most of those settlements came from the George Floyd protests in 2020, where police officers shot and partially blinded some civilians with rubber bullets and brutally beat others.
A lack of documentation has also challenged efforts to hold police officers accountable for inappropriate use of force. Only 57% of police agencies in the state submitted use-of-force documentation to the state Division of Criminal Justice for its inaugural report on how police agencies interact with civilians. Denver Police Department was one of the agencies that did not submit data for the report.
One issue the report cites for the incomplete dataset is the “uncertainty regarding uniform definitions of some terms,” particularly around the definition of “use of force.” The data show officers reported using force in just 0.3% of all contacts with civilians.
The report also mentioned that 89% of officer misconduct complaints were either “closed” or “unfounded.” Charges for officer misconduct were filed in just 95 cases, or approximately 29% of the 327 complaints that were filed.