By VICTOR PATE / SYRACUSE.COM (Opinion)
To the Editor:
Correction officers brutally beat Robert Brooks to death on video camera. Less than three months later, officers beat 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi to death. This nonchalant brutality takes place daily in prisons across the state. For decades, officers have beaten and killed people, especially Black people, in New York’s prisons — including Leonard Strickland, Samuel Harrell, Karl Taylor, Terry Cooper, John McMillon and countless others — and yet the racist system of brutality continues unabated. It has been repeatedly reported how officers carry out sexual violence, waterboarding, physical brutality that leaves people with fractured skulls and broken bones, and other rampant abuse amidst a “scourge of racial bias.” Officers then systematically lock people in solitary confinement with false “assault on staff” charges to cover up their abuse…