Robert Brooks’ Fatal Beating at Marcy Prison Exposed a Crisis of Abuse

There are almost 2 million individuals in American prisons at any given time, the largest incarceration rate in the world. An estimated 22% of American prison staff have physically assaulted inmates, while 45% of reported incidents list beatings as the preferred method of violence.

In the case of 43-year-old Robert Brooks, who was serving a 12-year prison sentence for first-degree assault, his civil rights and future were stripped away—and his story became one of the most consequential cases of prison abuse in not just New York’s history, but in American history.

Elizabeth Mazur—a partner at Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. who co-represented Brooks’ family with Steve Schwarz of Faraci Lange LLP—notes Brooks had much to look forward to as his 2026 release approached. “He received mental health treatment to address issues that brought him to prison, he earned his GED, learned American Sign Language, worked in horticulture and maintained connections to family and friends,” she tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

But on the late evening of December 9, 2024, he was transferred from Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., to Marcy Correctional Facility in Marcy, N.Y., after being involved in multiple physical altercations; it was thought the transfer would help ensure his safety.

Brooks was already bleeding from the face when he was brought into a medical examination room on December 9. Then correctional officers—all white, while Brooks was Black—proceeded to punch him in the torso, groin and head and choke him for at least 10 minutes. Brooks was handcuffed, and several staff members did nothing to help. His body eventually went limp from the assault, and he was taken to a nearby hospital. Brooks was pronounced dead early the next morning.

Public outrage soon emerged, none more so than from Brooks’ family. Mazur says the family felt it was vital to know what happened during the attack and, more importantly, who was responsible. “This went beyond identifying the individual officers who put hands on Robert,” she says, “but everyone else whose actions or inactions led to this horrific occurrence.”

Bernadette Rabuy, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that Marcy Correctional Facility ranks high for prison abuse, noting officers may attack in certain locations like infirmaries to hide their crimes. “The nature of prisons makes it a lot less likely that there's going to be evidence because of officers not wanting to violate a code of silence,” she adds.

Yet on December 27, 2024, body camera footage of Brooks’ beating was made public by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The footage came from four officers whose cameras were all unknowingly in standby mode—meaning they were powered on but not recording any audio with the video—and showed the individuals who initiated the violence or failed to intervene.

Mazur says this footage became especially important because officers fabricated their reports about Brooks’ attack. “According to those reports, the only force the officers used against Robert was pepper spray. They did not say anything about the mistreatment and beatings that appear on the body-worn cameras.” She admits that, without footage, the false reports would have been the only information about Brooks’ death.

Michelle Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, agrees it’s critical such footage existed in this case, telling A&E Crime + Investigation, “It was pretty incontrovertible evidence of this level of abuse.”

Rabuy adds that lack of video evidence is usually a reason why so few use-of-force prison cases are ever investigated or substantiated, even if the wounds left behind are severe. “[There are] patterns of officers using force in a way to make it less likely they'll get caught—[like] blows to the ribs, because that's an area that's gonna be concealed,” she says.

The body-camera footage laid the groundwork for a federal civil rights complaint to be filed in January 2025 accusing the New York Department of Corrections and Community Services and over a dozen of its officials for violating Brooks’ Eighth Amendment rights.

Soon after Brooks’ death was ruled a homicide in February 2025, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced 10 prison employees would be charged for the murder. By then, 17 corrections department employees had been suspended without pay.

As Subodh Chandra, managing partner at the Chandra Law Firm in California and Ohio, explains to A&E Crime + Investigation, those serving under local government authority, like prisons, “often escape accountability unless the plaintiff can establish that whatever constitutional violation occurred was the product of an unconstitutional custom, policy, pattern or practice, rather than a one-off instance.”

As such, attorneys may invoke the Section 1983 statute, in which Chandra says local governments and officials can be sued for constitutional and federal statutory violations.

“We pursued claims against supervisory prison officials for acting with deliberate indifference to systemic problems in the prison system that, we allege, facilitate the misconduct that caused Robert’s death,” Mazur concurs. Many of the suspended prison officers that were involved pleaded guilty outright, with four being sentenced to separate terms ranging between two and 22 years’ imprisonment for various charges.

Three of the suspended officers—David Kingsley, Matthew Galliher and Nicholas Kieffer—faced trial in October 2025. Kingsley was the only officer found guilty of second-degree murder, with a sentence of 25 years to life in addition to a first-degree manslaughter conviction. Galliher and Kieffer were acquitted in early 2026. However, that September, Brooks’ family was awarded a $24 million settlement—the largest in New York’s history for a prison death lawsuit.

Chandra concedes the case’s outcome reflects the seriousness of the officers’ crimes: “This is a highly unusual result not just for Section 1983 litigation, but for litigation involving prisoners.”

Mazur hopes Brooks’ case makes prison systems take incarcerated individuals’ safety more seriously as a systemic issue. “Without the body-worn cameras, many people would have never believed that anything like this could happen,” she says, “but the video shows the dangers incarcerated individuals face on a regular basis.”

In the wake of Brooks’ beating, the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision stated that in addition to the firing and punishment of the individuals involved, it would strive for a change in the “culture and practices” of its prison systems to prevent abuse in the future.

Yet Deitch notes that while prison abuse isn’t an exclusively American issue, the U.S. lacks federal independent oversight bodies to monitor prison conditions. “We've normalized [prison abuse] in this country,” she laments. “The [Brooks] case exposed how little accountability there is for wrongdoing inside these institutions and for the harm that comes to people who are incarcerated.”

Brooks’ family says they plan to use the settlement money to create a foundation in support of prison reform. And while Rabuy points out over 200 people have perished in New York state prisons since Brooks’ attack, she’s also optimistic change can occur within the system, if prison officials are willing to change the tone inside: “Hopefully, as we get further from Brooks’ killing, officials will remember what happened and prevent the next tragedy.”