Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department Is Not Following Its Own Use-of-Force Rules, Prisoners’ Legal Services Finds
PLS investigation documents chokeholds, handcuffs used as weapons, and broken bones, and finds officers involved in Shacoby Kenny’s death continued working around incarcerated people
BOSTON — September 3, 2026 — Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts (PLS) today made public an open letter sent August 31 to Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins and Special Sheriff Mark Lawhorne, documenting a pattern of force at the Suffolk County House of Correction (South Bay) that violates the department’s own written use-of-force policy.
PLS opened its investigation at South Bay after the death of Shacoby Kenny, a young Black man held there while awaiting trial. Mr. Kenny died in December 2025, after being restrained by correction officers. In July, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide, determining that his cause of death was hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen and blood flow from a cardiac arrest, due to physical restraint by correction officers.
What PLS found was not confined to that one incident. Clients described officers putting them in chokeholds and kneeling on their necks and upper backs. They described officers punching them while gripping handcuffs across their knuckles, which in at least two documented instances left injuries requiring staples or stitches. They described officers bending their wrists to the point of severe pain during routine escorts, after they were already handcuffed and offering no resistance, and in at least two documented cases that use of force appears to have caused fractures.
“The Sheriff’s Department wrote these rules itself, and it trains its officers on them,” said Dave Rini, Executive Director of PLS. “What people inside describe is a practice of violence that exposes a policy in name only. Nearly nine months after a man was killed in custody by Sheriff’s Department staff, we are still documenting the same techniques, sometimes by some of the same officers and on the same unit.”
SCSD policy explicitly prohibits chokeholds and directs officers away from areas of the body most vulnerable to serious injury. It does not list handcuffs or keys as approved weapons, and states that restraints may not be used as weapons at all. Pain compliance is permitted when someone is resisting; the complaints PLS receives describe it used on people who are not. And the strong undercurrent behind these findings, the letter says, is that certain officers’ names surface repeatedly in allegations of excessive force, yet they face no apparent consequences.
On April 30, nearly five months after Mr. Kenny died, SCSD publicly addressed the status of the officers involved for the first time, stating that “all officers in question continue to serve in non-inmate/detainee contact posts, pending the outcome of the investigation.” It repeated that statement on July 21.
PLS has documented those officers in contact posts both before and after the April statement, including as members of the Sheriff’s Escort and Response Team (SERT), which uses force as a routine part of its function. In February, two of them used force on a detainee in the same unit where Mr. Kenny was restrained. Another was involved in a separate use of force in June. On August 11, three weeks after the homicide ruling, two were working SERT during cell searches. Some have escorted incarcerated people to meetings with their lawyers, including with PLS.
The department produced records documenting one of those incidents in response to a public records request, so it should have been aware of it. It has declined a separate request for records on officers terminated over use of force, citing a personnel exemption that the letter says does not apply.
The letter warns that officers under investigation remaining in contact with the people who witnessed Mr. Kenny’s death raises the risk of intimidation and retaliation and tells both staff and incarcerated people that violence in custody carries no consequence. Incarcerated people and their families have described fear of any contact with these officers.
PLS is asking the Sheriff’s Department to:
- Immediately suspend all eight officers involved in the use of force against Mr. Kenny, pending the results of external investigations
- Review every use of force since December 7, 2025, for chokeholds, kneeling on necks and backs, inappropriate pain compliance, and handcuffs used as weapons, and take appropriate disciplinary action
- Retrain officers on the policies governing each of those practices
- Change SERT eligibility, including automatic ineligibility for officers with a sustained finding of inappropriate force, a court finding of excessive force, or a volume of complaints reflecting a pattern of excessive force or inappropriate conduct
- Improve training on de-escalation, professional interaction with incarcerated people, and documentation of uses of force
- Reduce and eliminate camera blind spots, improve video quality, and require the Sheriff’s Investigative Division to note when an interaction moves into a blind spot/out of video frame
- Hold real disciplinary hearings, allow witnesses to testify, and make grievance forms and policy freely available
PLS is not alone in calling for suspension. Administrative leave after a death involving use of force is well-established practice among law enforcement and correctional agencies, because it protects both the integrity of the investigation and the rights of the officers involved. On August 5, the Boston City Council voted 11-0 for a resolution urging SCSD to adopt critical-incident administrative leave standards. Six days later, two of the officers were working cell searches.
“Every one of these is something the Sheriff can do on his own authority,” continued Rini. “No court has to order it, and no legislature has to pass it. Nearly nine months on, many of the people who saw what happened to Mr. Kenny are still living alongside the officers involved in the use of force against him.”
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About Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts
Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts is a non-profit legal services organization founded in 1972 that provides civil legal assistance to people who are incarcerated in Massachusetts state prisons and county jails and houses of correction.
Contact:
press@plsma.org
(617) 482-277