All 10 prison guards charged in connection with the death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility have been offered a plea deal.
Each defendant and their attorneys were at a pretrial conference in Oneida County on Monday.
Six of those workers who are all former correction officers — Nicholas Anzalone, David Kingsley Anthony Farina, Christopher Walrath, Mathew Galliher and Nicholas Kieffer — face the highest charges of murder. An assortment of the 10 also face charges of manslaughter, gang assault, offering a false instrument for filing and one faces a count of tampering with physical evidence.
The prosecutor's offer to David Walters, charged with second-degree manslaughter, was to plead guilty to the existing charge with a recommendation for a mid-range sentence, his attorney Nick Passalacqua said.
“We’ve not been made an offer as I define it. We’ve been asked to plead guilty to the charge,” Passalacqua said, adding that he believed other defendants received similar offers.
Other attorneys declined comment after court.
Walters was due back in court April 30.
Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, who took over the case as a special prosecutor after state Attorney General Letitia James recused herself, also told defense attorneys that he talked to federal prosecutors looking into Brooks' death about the offers and that they responded favorably.
“They are actively pursuing the matter. I have suggested to them that the dispositions I have offered would satisfy the case completely,” Fitzpatrick said in court.
Fitzpatrick has recommended to the judge no more than 18 years in prison for those who accept the plea deal.
The accused will appear again in court in April when they will either accept or decline the offer they received. Then they will be back in court in May and early June to hear the court's decision on those motions.
The charges stem from an incident at Marcy Correctional caught on body-worn cameras, triggering widespread outrage and calls for justice. Body camera footage released by the New York attorney general’s office shows correctional officers hitting Brooks while he was restrained at the prison on Dec. 9. He died the next day at a hospital in Utica.
An autopsy report issued by the county medical examiner’s office in January concluded that Brooks’ death was caused by compression of the neck and multiple blunt impact injuries and that the manner of death was determined to be a homicide, according to Brooks' family attorneys.
Brooks had been serving a 12-year prison sentence for first-degree assault since 2017. He arrived at the prison in Oneida County only hours before the beating after being transferred from another nearby facility, officials said.
Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick took over the case as a special prosecutor after state Attorney General Letitia James recused herself, citing her office’s representation of several implicated officers in separate civil lawsuits.
A watchdog group reported “rampant abuse by staff” at Marcy after interviewing people incarcerated there in October 2022. The Correctional Association of New York said they were told of physical assaults in locations without cameras, such as between the gates, in vans and in showers. A guard told one new arrival that this was a ”‘hands-on facility,’ we’re going to put hands on you if we don’t like what you’re doing,” according to the report.