Three former adult corrections officers at Hawaii Community Correctional Center in Hilo have been convicted of the brutal beating of an inmate in 2015 and for violating the man’s civil rights by attempting to cover up the use of excessive force.
The three — 31-year-old Jason Tagaloa, 38-year-old Craig Pinkney, and 50-year-old Jonathan Taum — had all pleaded not guilty to assaulting the former inmate, 38-year-old Chawn Kaili, but a guilty verdict was delivered Thursday by a federal jury in Honolulu following a three-week trial.
A fourth guard, Jordan DeMattos, previously pleaded guilty for his role in the assault and cover up, and testified for the government during the trial.
After the jury’s verdict, U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi ordered the U.S. Marshals to take the defendants into custody pending their sentencing hearings. All three had been free on $25,000 bond.
“These defendants abused the trust given to them as law enforcement officers when they violently assaulted an inmate and lied to cover it up,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on Monday.
Tagaloa, Pinkney, Taum and DeMattos were all fired by the state Department of Public Safety on Dec. 23, 2016.
“Justice has been served as those involved were held accountable. The Department will not tolerate this type of behavior from any employee,” DPS Director Max Otani said.
The evidence at trial established that the defendants assaulted Kaili in the jail’s recreation yard. Over the course of two minutes, the defendants punched and kicked the inmate in the head and body while he was lying face-down in a pool of his own blood. Kaili suffered a broken nose, jaw and eye socket.
At least a portion of the recreation yard assault was caught on surveillance video.
After the beating, the defendants wrote false reports in which they omitted almost all of the force they had used. When the prison opened an investigation, the defendants met to get their stories straight and brainstorm false excuses they would give for having used force.
“As correctional officers, they were held to upholding the standards of law enforcement officers within the state prisons, and they did not do so in this case,” said Special Agent in Charge Steven Merrill of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Honolulu Field Office.
The maximum penalties for the charged crimes are 10 years of imprisonment for the deprivation-of-rights offense, 20 years of imprisonment for the false report offenses, and five years of imprisonment for the conspiracy offense.
Kaili, who was released from prison in 2020, filed a suit in state court in 2017, which alleged, among other accusations, that he was denied immediate medical treatment for his injuries.
Kaili’s lawsuit, which named the three convicted defendants, plus DeMattos, then-adult corrections officer Lt. Jon Waikiki and former HCCC warden Peter MacDonald, stated Kaili was so bloodied by the beating that HCCC personnel disposed of jail-issued clothing.
Kaili also alleged Taum, Pinkney, Tagaloa and Demattos “comprised in part or whole a group of individuals who collectively referred to themselves as the ‘Alpha Dawgs’” and “that a purpose, if not the sole purpose, of the ‘Alpha Dawgs’ was the intentional violation of civil rights of incarcerated persons … often in connection with illegal interrogations” conducted by Pinkney, Tagaloa, Demattos and/or Taum.
The suit claimed Pinkney, Tagaloa and Demattos “each weighed in excess of 250 pounds” and that the Alpha Dawgs “used their positions of authority to intimidate and attempt to intimidate inmates.”
The lawsuit was dismissed on Feb. 28, 2020, because Kaili or his lawyers failed to file a pretrial statement within the time required by court rules.
An order issued on April 15, 2020, granted Kaili’s motion to set aside the lawsuit’s dismissal, but the state Judiciary website shows no further substantive filings.
Efforts by the Tribune-Herald on Monday to contact Kaili were unsuccessful.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.