News and Commentary

A Sheriff Was Accused Of Ignoring A ‘Sex Ring.’ A Judge Just ‘Eviscerated’ The Claims.

   DailyWire.com
"police officers stand with handguns, stun gun and tools on their holsters."
NRedmond via Getty Images

A sheriff in Florida is having his nightmare ended after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that alleged the sheriff was indifferent to an alleged “sex ring” involving some of his deputies having consensual sex with a woman in her home.

Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan was sued by two sisters who alleged that “because the sheriff took no action to curb their sexual activities, two then-deputies, Walter Thomas and Mark Smith, became emboldened enough to sexually abuse the then-juvenile plaintiffs,” the Pensacola News Journal reported.

The outlet went on to report that Senior U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson “eviscerated the claims in a 25-page order last week and dismissed both cases.”

More from the News Journal:

The judge noted that in the thousands of pages of filings from the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joe Zarzaur, it was difficult to determine what information was relevant, irrelevant, necessary and unnecessarily salacious.

Vinson wrote that Zarzaur took “unsubstantiated liberties” with the facts of the case, “so much so that many of the asserted ‘facts’ don’t match — and are sometimes directly contradicted by — his own exhibits.”

Zarzaur told the News Journal that he respects the court’s decisions, and that he and his clients are weighing their options on cases that are still pending at the state level.

Morgan, of course, denied the allegations, and the News Journal noted that proving “deliberate indifference” is incredibly difficult, as “an individual has to exhibit what is essentially a reckless disregard for consequences.”

The allegations against the sheriff boiled down to an accusation that because he knew multiple detectives were having consensual sex with former jail employee Leah Manning, the sheriff should have known those officers would assault underage girls.

“The plaintiffs posited that when a sheriff ‘tacitly allows’ his deputies to have sex on duty without consequence, ‘it was foreseeable that bad deputies might ‘push the envelope’ of what they could get away with. The fact that many deputies were having sex on duty with the then-teenage (plaintiffs’) mother so frequently makes it very foreseeable that the deputies would eventually try to sexually assault (plaintiffs)’” the News Journal reported.

Judge Vinson, however, agreed with Morgan’s defense attorneys.

“Can it be seriously maintained that it was ‘very foreseeable’ that a deputy’s consensual sex with the mother would lead him to molest her minor child?” the judge asked in his ruling. “Child molestation is not a reasonably anticipated outgrowth of consensual adult sex.”

Vinson further noted that there was no evidence Morgan even knew Manning had children.

“Obviously, Sheriff Morgan cannot have been subjectively aware of (and disregarded) a threat to a child he didn’t know existed,” Vinson wrote.

The deputies who had sex with Manning were accused of molesting the teenage girls. One of the former deputies, Smith, was acquitted on charges that he touched one of the girls while she slept. The other deputy, Thomas, was convicted of sexually abusing one of the teenage girls – at the mother and stepfather’s request and “with their participation,” the News Journal reported. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his crimes.

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  A Sheriff Was Accused Of Ignoring A ‘Sex Ring.’ A Judge Just ‘Eviscerated’ The Claims.