A former employee at a Kentucky juvenile detention center who broke a 15-year-old boy’s arm has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, according to the federal Department of Justice.
Nathaniel K. Lumpkins, 33, pleaded guilty to a charge of violating the teen’s Constitutional right to be free from excessive force.
U.S. District Judge David Bunning sentenced Lumpkins Tuesday in federal court in Ashland.
The incident happened at the Woodsbend Youth Development Center in Morgan County in January 2019.
Workers were trying to calm down a teenager, identified as L.J. in the court record, by talking to him, but Lumpkins ran between them and grabbed the boy, according to the court record.
L.J. struggled and Lumpkins and three other men eventually held him down on the floor.
L.J., who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed about 127 pounds, was compliant at that time and not a threat, but Lumpkins twisted the teen’s hand back onto his wrist and put his body weight on LJ.’s arm, breaking two bones, according to the court record.
Lumpkins admitted in his guilty plea that the use of force was improper and “done out of anger.”
He had been disciplined just three months earlier for using a similar improper restraint on a juvenile at the facility.
After youth workers put L.J. in an isolation cell, Lumpkins slammed the teen’s injured arm against the wall and yelled at him, and later wrote a false report saying L.J. had threatened to kill youth workers.
The Department of Juvenile Justice fired Lumpkins after the January 2019 incident.
His attorney, Ned Pillersorf, argued that Lumpkins didn’t plan to hurt the teen, but rather overreacted to a situation that L.J. instigated by refusing multiple commands to not resist officers.
Pillrsdorf pointed out that several corrections workers helped subdue L.J. and said it’s unclear that Lumpkins was soley responsible for the teen’s injury.
But the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Zachary S. Dembo, said in a memo that Lumpkins was convicted of “needlessly and cruelly” breaking the arm of a 15-year-old while he was already being held down.
The prosecutor noted Lumpkins’ lack of a criminal record and service as a volunteer firefighter as positives, but also pointed out the January 2019 incident wasn’t the first in which he was cited for improper conduct.
Dembo also argued a significant sentence for Lumpkins was warranted as a way to deter potential similar conduct by other employees of the agency.
The U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year opened an investigation of how the state treats young people in the eight detention centers run by the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice.
One subject will be whether workers at the centers use excessive force or punitive isolation.
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