On allegations of assaulting an inmate by hitting him in the head and hurling him to the ground, three Harris County prison officers will not go to trial.
Last month, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office dropped a minor assault prosecution against John Ziesemer due to a lack of evidence. According to court documents, Ezihuo Osiminibeke completed a pre-trial diversion program last month, and in exchange, the judge agreed to dismiss the identical case against him. Additionally, a prosecutor stated in court last week that Jimmy Poole’s misdemeanor assault case will be dropped the week of December 16 following his completion of the second of two online law enforcement courses he consented to take, Interpersonal Communication in a Correctional Facility.
The cops were fired around six months after a grand jury indicted them for their suspected involvement in Adael Gonzalez-Garcia’s beating. Osiminibeke and Poole were charged with hitting Gonzalez-Garcia in the head while attempting to control him, while Ziesemer was charged with hurling Gonzalez-Garcia to the ground.
Following the indictment, the sheriff’s office removed all three officers of their positions, allowing them to perform tasks that did not require them to interact with inmates. Jason Spencer, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez’s chief of staff, stated in an email on Tuesday that while Ziesemer and Osiminibeke have since returned to their regular responsibilities, Poole is still prohibited from engaging with detainees while his case is still pending.
According to Spencer, Ziesemer was determined not to have broken any rules, whereas Osiminibeke was suspended for one day for the altercation. Administrative review of Poole’s case is still pending.
Randall Kallinen, a Houston lawyer who is defending Gonzalez-Garcia in his civil lawsuit against Harris County, described the cases’ results as “horrible.” They nearly killed him.
Gonzalez-Garcia has not been able to work since the confrontation in November 2022, which left him in a coma for a few days, according to Kallinen. Kallinen went on to say that this could render him permanently incapacitated.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office stated in a statement that a prosecutor’s role is to pursue justice, not convictions. We believe that the community benefited most from these resolutions.
According to the sheriff’s office, Gonzalez-Garcia was arrested on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2022 on an outstanding DWI warrant out of Walker County, which led to his placement in the Harris County Jail. According to officials, Gonzalez-Garcia fell from the top bunk of a bunk bed and was transferred to the jail’s clinic the next day.
Gonzalez-Garcia was being led from the clinic to a cell block when the incident broke out. Kallinen disputes the sheriff’s office’s earlier claims that Gonzalez-Garcia got hostile and attempted to strike one of the officers.
In a phone interview, Kallinen claimed that Poole was merely engaging in passive resistance and that security camera footage showed him pounding Gonzalez-Garcia in the head at least four times. This implies that you are withdrawing from someone by saying things such, “Don’t touch me,” “I don’t want to,” and so forth.
A request for comment from Ziesemer’s lawyer, Justin Keiter, and Osiminibeke’s lawyer, Reynaldo Ramirez Jr., was not answered. Joshua Normand, Poole’s lawyer, was contacted by phone but declined to comment.
The downtown Harris County Jail in Houston has been overcrowded and understaffed for years, creating a culture where human rights lawyers like Kallinen claim that disproportionate force against inmates is normal. He believes that the verdicts in the trials against Ziesemer, Osiminibeke, and Poole will simply give officers more confidence to employ what he considers to be excessive and dubious force.
David Harris, a policing expert and law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said it is important that the officers were charged at all. According to Harris, prosecutors have traditionally been reluctant to press charges against law enforcement and penitentiary officials, primarily because they believe they are on the same side as the officers.
However, Jarrell Gibson, the main prosecutor in the cases against Ziesemer, Osiminibeke, and Poole, chose to show a grand jury evidence of the officers’ possible crime before dismissing the charges six months later, which Harris said he finds odd. When grand juries conclude that there is probable cause that a criminal has been committed, they issue indictments, which are written statements charging someone of a crime.
It is highly unusual to later declare, “We don’t have enough evidence,” Harris remarked.
Gonzalez-Garcia’s civil complaint is currently pending in Harris County. U.S. Magistrate Christina Bryan dismissed the lawsuit in March after it was filed in the Southern District of Texas in February 2023. The federal magistrate stated in her ruling that Gonzalez-Garcia had not proven that the purported constitutional infringement was motivated by an official policy. Following Kallinen’s request to revise the complaint—a formal document outlining allegations—the lawsuit was resurrected.
Republish this narrative
Our stories can be republished in print or online for free.
