West Virginia corrections officers plead guilty to not intervening as colleagues fatally beat inmate

Associated Press

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Two West Virginia correctional officers accused of failing to intervene as their colleagues beat an incarcerated man to death in 2022 have pleaded guilty in federal court. Former Southern Regional Jail employees Jacob Boothe and Ashley Toney admitted to violating 37-year-old Quantez Burks’s civil rights by not protecting him from being physically assaulted by other correctional officers. Toney and Boothe, who appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in Charleston, were among six former correctional officers indicted by a federal grand jury in November 2023. Burks was a pretrial detainee at the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver who died less than a day after he was booked into the jail.