A newly hired Waldo County sheriff’s deputy is one of four current or former corrections officers being sued for “attacking and using excessive force” against an inmate at the Penobscot County Jail last April.
Elijah Law, who was sworn in this week, previously worked at the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor. Rasheib Yancy, a former inmate at the jail, alleges that Law was part of a group of officers that sprayed him with a chemical agent, threw him to the ground, put their knees in his back and twisted his arms, wrist and legs, “causing serious pain and injury” according to a lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court of Maine in June.
In addition to Law, Yancy’s complaint names Sergeant Ian Libby and corrections officers Ralph Norwood and Ryan Buck as defendants.
Yancy was recovering from back surgery at the time of the alleged assault and since then has been unable to walk and has to use a wheelchair, his fiancee Elizabeth Rivera said in an interview.
“They beat the [crap] out of him,” she said.
All four men deny Yancy’s allegations, court documents show. The Waldo County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. Penobscot County Sheriff Troy Morton said his office is “not able to comment on matters that involve any potential litigation.” Lawyers for the defendants did not reply to a request for comment.
This is not the first time Norwood has been accused of excessive force. In 2018 another inmate at the Penobscot County Jail filed a lawsuit alleging that he was assaulted by Norwood and other corrections officers. A judge dismissed that suit in 2019, according to federal court records.
According to Yancy and four other inmates who witnessed the alleged attack — all of whom submitted written statements to the court — the incident began when Yancy was about to be transferred to the Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset.
Yancy said he did not want to be transferred because he was suffering from back pain and didn’t want to be “shackled for 2 hours in the back of a van.” In response, he and witnesses wrote, he was thrown to the ground and assaulted by the corrections officers.
Yancy was arrested in Newport in 2022 and charged with Class A drug trafficking after officers with Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and state police seized about $40,000 worth of fentanyl and cocaine from his car.