Federal and local prosecutors said on Wednesday that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges in the 2015 death of a prisoner at the Fishkill Correctional Facility who died after an altercation with a group of guards there.
An autopsy classified the death of the inmate, Samuel Harrell, 30, as a homicide, and the prison had long been identified by inmate advocates as a place where officers routinely abused inmates.
But Joon H. Kim, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, said that prosecutors in his office had found “insufficient evidence to meet the high burden of proof required for a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.”
Meanwhile, William V. Grady, the Dutchess County district attorney, said his office had also found insufficient evidence to support a prosecution “under any state theory of homicide.”
“There is no video evidence of the altercation between Mr. Harrell and the corrections officers, and numerous eyewitness accounts of the incident, including those provided by inmates, are inconsistent and contradictory,” Mr. Kim and Mr. Grady said in a joint statement.
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