Ex-Prison Officers Say State Ignored Charges

Two former supervisors and a former guard at Corcoran State Prison told a legislative hearing Wednesday that their attempts to draw attention to questionable inmate shooting deaths by guards were ignored at the highest levels of the state Department of Corrections, as well as by an official in the Wilson administration.

With nowhere else to turn, Facility Capt. Ralph Mineau, former Lt. Steve Rigg and former guard Richard Caruso said they had to take their complaints about brutality and cover-ups at the prison to the FBI in 1994. In turn, they said, they were met with death threats and intimidation from fellow officers and supervisors, threats they say were ignored by then-Warden George Smith.

“I am a whistle-blower. I am not sorry for the action I took,” Rigg told the joint panel in sworn testimony. “I am sorry I put my family through the horrors of the reprisals and harassment we have been subjected to.

“My career came to an abrupt end. I am sorry I have been threatened with death or harm. I am sorry my wife is frightened to sleep in our home at night and often sleeps on the bathroom floor fearing an ambush.”

Four years after the three officers and others came forward to provide evidence about flawed prison policies and questionable shootings, they said no one at the Department of Corrections or the state attorney general’s office has thoroughly investigated the shootings that led to seven inmate deaths and 43 woundings.

Indeed, Caruso testified, a special team of Corrections Department investigators dispatched to Corcoran last year at the behest of Gov. Pete Wilson investigated and disciplined only one officer involved in a shooting. That officer was Caruso, and the shooting was one that resulted in no injuries to the inmates participating in a fistfight.

“Out of [all the] incidents at Corcoran State Prison with firearms, the only one this team looked into was me,” Caruso said, turning to top corrections officials. “And the only one your office disciplined was me, the whistle-blower.”

The legislative hearings, in their second day, were called by four committees to look into the allegations against Corcoran guards and officials and into whether the Wilson administration and state attorney general’s office failed to adequately investigate problems at the prison.

The administration and attorney general’s office cite an ongoing federal investigation as the reason they decided not to delve into the shooting deaths during two state probes in 1996 and 1997.

Rigg testified that he called Craig Brown, then undersecretary of the state Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, with complaints in 1994. A corrections official said later Wednesday that Rigg never put his complaints in writing, so Brown, now Wilson’s finance director, did not meet with him.

Rigg and the others also said their complaints were shunned by Eddie Myers, the deputy director of the Corrections Department. He refused to take their calls, they said.

“Eddie Myers would not talk to me,” Rigg testified. “He told the lieutenant that he didn’t want to know who I was or my name.”

Myers declined Wednesday to discuss the allegation.

Wednesday’s session dealt in large part with the accounts of the three whistle-blowers who kicked off the FBI investigation out of frustration with what they termed a wide-scale cover-up of shooting deaths and other brutality. The shootings occurred during prison yard fights watched over by guards. Internal reports show that in all but a few cases, the inmates did not carry weapons or cause so much as a swollen lip while brawling.

The whistle-blowers traced much of the violence to the department’s so-called integration policy--the practice of mixing rival gang members into the same small exercise yards inside Corcoran’s security housing unit.

“The integrated yard policy in the SHU was a loser,” said Mineau, who transferred to High Desert Prison in Susanville after he was threatened at Corcoran.

Rigg said the policy led to countless fistfights that ended with guards firing gas guns that discharged wood blocks and, occasionally, deadly assault rifles--all in the name of stopping brawling inmates from injuring each other. He said state shooting review boards, which ruled every shooting justified, were composed of friendly wardens and associate wardens.

“I have reviewed every shooting review from Corcoran and have yet to find a clean shooting, yet to find a shooting that was within departmental policy,” said Rigg, an FBI-trained firearms expert. “You cannot shoot the victim of a fistfight and call it a good shooting. . . . You cannot use a firearm to stop a stand-up fistfight.”

Department of Corrections officials concede that there were deep problems at Corcoran but say most of them have been addressed under its new warden, George Galaza, and the state’s new corrections director, Cal Terhune. They say the integrated yard policy has been modified in the past two years. No serious shooting injuries or deaths have taken place at Corcoran since 1995.

“There have been problems, but the department has been working to resolve them as they come up and do things better,” Corrections Department spokesman Tip Kindel said Wednesday.

Former guard Caruso, who took key documents about the shootings out of the prison and handed them to the FBI, disputed that the system was fixed.

“The reason Corcoran got cleaned up was not the new warden. Don’t be fooled,” he told legislators. “It was because of me and the other whistle-blowers. But they didn’t clean it all up. A lot of the officers involved in these incidents are still there.”

Caruso was involved in more discharges of the wood-block gun at inmates than any other gunner at Corcoran, before he took a stress leave two years ago. An investigation into one of those shootings was later reopened by the corrections investigation team that did not probe the fatal and serious shootings at Corcoran.

“The special investigation team came to me and said, ‘Richard, you’re the key to this investigation,’ ” he said. “ ‘Without your testimony, we can’t get to the bottom of what’s going on.’

“They ended up investigating and disciplining me.”

During Rigg’s testimony, the partisan nature of the hearings flared when Assemblyman Jan Goldsmith (R-Poway) challenged the witness’ veracity, implying that, because Rigg had signed a movie deal, parts of his testimony could not be believed.

The assemblyman’s suggestion sparked an angry exchange along party lines, with Democrats arguing that his comments were pointless.

Late Wednesday evening, former Corrections Department Chief James Gomez testified that it was not until late 1994 that he first heard about problems with shootings at Corcoran. This was after seven inmates had been shot dead over five years.

He also said he was not aware until this week’s hearings that wardens could pick wardens from other state penal institutions to staff prison shooting review boards. That practice, he said, was wrong. Gomez, when asked why the investigation team he put into place did not look into any of the serious or fatal shootings, expressed surprise. “I would have expected they would have looked at all the facts relative to that three- or four-year period.”

He said the only restriction that federal authorities placed on state investigators was to steer clear of a single fatal 1994 shooting and a few related items.

Also testifying late Wednesday were members of the corrections investigations team.

Member Bryan Neeley said the team was not allowed to use all the available investigative tools in its probe. The investigators were told they could not invoke a provision of the state government code requiring peace officers to cooperate with a criminal investigation or face insubordination charges, he said. That tool, Neeley said, was taken away “by someone in Sacramento.” He could not say by whom.

The hearings will continue today.