Photo by Amy Theilig

Last month, on the other side of the planet from Abu Ghraib prison and 3,200 miles from Guantanamo Bay, right here in Orange County, five jail deputies handcuffed, hooded, beat and tortured a 38-year-old San Clemente businessman, according to a claim filed this week.

Still in pain three weeks after the July 17 incident, Greg W. Hall told OC Weekly about a Sunday evening that began auspiciously: enjoying a beer early in the afternoon and later several coffees, contemplating surfing and walking his dog at the beach. As Hall backed his SUV out of a parking space, his dog jumped in front of a side-view mirror and distracted him. He sideswiped another vehicle, causing minor damage.

When police arrived, they gave Hall a field-sobriety check and two Breathalyzer tests. Crime lab records show his blood alcohol level was 0.00. Nevertheless, deputies believed Hall acted oddly. Currently on probation for an illegal prescription case in 2003, Hall told the officer at the scene about the beer and admitted that he used Paxil, an antidepressant medication. The deputy arrested him on suspicion of DUI and transported him to the Orange County Jail for a drug test. After a nurse took his blood, the arresting officer told Hall, “You’ll probably be out of here in about an hour,” and left.

But a 16-hour “hellish nightmare” awaited Hall, who attended Newport Harbor High School, graduated in 1991 from UC San Diego with a degree in economics, and says he has operated several small companies. When he complained about the tightness of his handcuffs, five deputies swarmed him, yelled obscenities and attacked without legitimate provocation, Hall claims. Handcuffed and overwhelmed, his body was treated like a piñata.

According to documents filed Aug. 11 with county officials, the deputies dragged Hall down a corridor, shoved his face into a cell door frame, threw him to the floor, punched him, kicked his ribs, stomped on his back and legs, bent and twisted his arms and wrists, and repeatedly slammed his face into the concrete. Hall says one deputy tried to break his right foot with his bare hands. He remembers an unrelenting, “two- or three-minute attack” that ended only when a superior officer ordered the deputies to stop.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” said Hall, bandaged and wearing a wrist cast. “They had no right to torture me. I was in handcuffs. I was cooperating.”

At press time, the results of Hall’s drug test were not available. But medical records show that during his visit to the jail he suffered a concussion, broken ribs, a gash in his leg, an eye contusion, broken veins in his feet, a shattered front tooth, lacerations and bruises over his body, contusions to a knee, neck pain, a fractured right wrist and nerve damage to his left hand. The handcuffs were locked so tightly that the steel sliced his hands and caused dangerous swelling. An imprint of a deputy’s boot could be seen on the back of his leg for days.

The beating was so severe that Hall defecated in his pants. Deputies laughed and called him a “shit monkey.” When they returned to his cell later, they cursed at him again—and tied a black mesh hood over his head.

Christopher B. Mears—Hall’s attorney, a former Irvine city councilman and the current chairman of the California Athletic Commission—said deputies left his client in that condition—hooded, handcuffed behind his back, soiled in feces and bleeding—for the next 12 hours. Officers also allegedly denied Hall food and water or access to a phone to call his family. Just before his release, Hall—still handcuffed—watched a jail staffer stitch the gash in his leg without anesthesia. Dizzy, sore and nauseated, he limped out of the building wondering why.

“They literally—and I mean literally—beat the shit out of him,” said Mears. “Those deputies can’t get away with this type of savage behavior against a defenseless person who is in their custody.”

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Jailhouse deputies have a difficult job. They are often the youngest, least experienced officers in the sheriff’s department, and their pay is as low as the potential daily risks are high. Although many of the citizens who pass through the jail system are not dangerous, these deputies regularly face society’s delinquents and psychopaths. Most perform their duties professionally.

But law enforcement sources, defense lawyers and former inmates tell the Weekly that a minority of officers in the Orange County Jail are, as a sheriff’s department official familiar with excessive force cases described them, “pure and simple thugs who don’t have the mental or emotional makeup to wear a badge.”

“Outsiders might think the department wouldn’t tolerate these bad apples,” said the official. “But they’re definitely there. They’re an embarrassment to the department. They’ve even had names, including ‘The Psycho Crew.’”

In 2003, my colleague Nick Schou reported the findings of Laguna Beach lawyer Richard P. Herman, a leading critic of jailhouse abuses. Herman claimed “inmates of the Orange County Jail awaken at night to the screams of other inmates being beaten.” Orange County Register investigative reporter Aldrin Brown had previously written a series of articles describing the horrific results of the beatings in local jails: detached retinas, ruptured eardrums, shattered jaws, severed arteries, broken limbs—even death from trauma.

Brown, now with a Tennessee newspaper, found evidence in 2000 that jail deputies entertained themselves by encouraging fights between inmates. In 2001, Brown and Register reporter John McDonald disclosed that four deputies had taken a 20-year-old inmate to an isolated area of the jail in December 1999 and crushed his testicles. Prosecutors agreed that the man had been tortured but said a code of silence among jail personnel prevented the filing of charges. Deputies claimed their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when they were brought before the grand jury.