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Daric Evans, 32, of Crisfield, pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice, related to covering up evidence that a fellow officer at ECI had unlawfully assaulted an inmate, federal authorities announced.
According to his guilty plea, on July 21, 2021, while working at at the state prison, Evans admitted that he learned of another officer who had used force against an inmate.
Upon learning of the incident, Evans responded to the scene, where he assisted other correctional officers with escorting the inmate to a medical evaluation. During the evaluation, the inmate cried and was visibly injured with blood on his face, prosecutors said.
The inmate also asserted at the time that he had been assaulted by a correctional officer, Samuel Warren.
Then, Evans and several other correctional officers escorted the inmate to a cell for a monitored strip search, during which he was compliant and still crying while CO David Quillen filmed the inmate during the evaluation.
Following the strip search, Evans and other officers watched the video of the inmate.
"After watching the video, a supervisory officer commented that the video looked bad and needed to be deleted," court documents state. "Quillen indicated that he would delete the video, and Evans understood that Quillen subsequently did so.
"In addition, the supervisory officer proposed a cover story for why the video had gone missing, and Evans and other officers agreed to lie about the deletion."
When the video was deleted, the officers got their stories straight and agreed to lie to investigators about what had happened to the video of the inmate. Evans also lied about what happened to the video, including by withholding the information from state investigators and lying to federal investigators.
Warren, 38, of Westover, previously pleaded guilty to federal offenses related to his unlawful assault of the inmate and is scheduled for sentencing in June. Quillen, 37, a Delaware resident also pleaded guilty to federal offenses related to the deletion of the video and is scheduled to be sentenced in May.
When he is sentenced in June, Evans will face up to five years on the other side of the bars in federal prison for the conspiracy to obstruct justice.
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