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Two Laurel residents have filed a $5 million federal lawsuit against Jones County Sheriff Joe Berlin and four deputies for multiple civil rights violations.
The suit was filed April 25 by DeShon Bayless and Angelia Page in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
Other defendants named in the suit are Capt. Vince Williams, Deputy Andrew Yates, Deputy Chase Smith and Sgt. Jake Driskell.
The suit lists 13 separate constitutional violations and alleges that the Jones County Sheriff’s Department ”has a history of wrongfully tolerating, condoning and encouraging “constitutional violations.”
The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages “for past and continuing violations of the Plaintiffs’ rights” beginning on Jan. 11 at Bayless’s residence. The plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and compensatory damages of at least $1 million and punitive damages of at least $4 million.
According to the lawsuit, Bayless and Page, his mother, live at a house in Laurel which she owns. On Jan. 11, the suit says, Bayless was in his parked car behind the house when Williams, Yates and Smith entered the residential property and began looking into the windows of the house.
Yates, the suit says, saw Bayless and “without reasonable suspicion” ordered him out of the vehicle. Bayless complied, the suit said, and was then thrown to the ground with excessive force, searched and arrested without cause.
The suit alleges one of the officers “violently shoved his face into the dirt” and another placed Bayless in a chokehold.
Bayless was incarcerated at the Jones County Jail for 15 hours before being released on his own recognizance. None of the Jones County Sheriff’s Department deputies on the scene had body cameras, according to the suit. Page showed Berlin some footage from a Ring camera on her house showing the incident.
The suit further alleges the defendants illegally seized Page’s residence before a search warrant was issued and that nothing illegal was found in the home.
According to the suit, Bayless was not committing a crime, did not pose a threat to the officers and was not resisting arrest before the officers used excessive force. The suit said Bayless “suffered emotional and psychological distress” as a result.
The suit states, “On information and belief, the JCSD has a custom and culture of violating the constitutional rights of others. Though not a written policy, this custom was so widespread as to have the force of law. “
The plantiffs, according to the suit, “are aware of five previous occurrences where the JCSD violated the constitutional rights of others.”
“Sheriff Berlin has never taken corrective action to fix the culture within his department or correct his misstatements to the media,” the suit alleges.
Court records show that in March, a settlement was announced in which plaintiff Monterian Dotson received $20,000 stemming from an encounter with Berlin in the parking lot of Lowe’s in Laurel.
The attorney for Bayless and Page, Michael Cory of Danks Miller & Cory in Jackson, said he has been contacted by a number of residents in Jones County “about what they believe are incidents where their rights were also violated and we are currently looking at those to determine if they fit our criteria.”
Sheriff Berlin was unavailable for comment. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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