Lawsuit: Louisiana deputies planted drugs, beat man after bar fight
Published 1:03 pm Thursday, June 28, 2018
LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) — A federal lawsuit claims Louisiana sheriff’s deputies planted drugs on a man and severely beat him in retaliation for a bar fight with another deputy.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday also accuses deputies from Iberia Parish Sheriff Louis Ackal’s office of falsifying reports on Rickey Roche’s arrest to make his beating appear justified.
The suit’s claims mirror testimony at Ackal’s criminal trial in 2016, when jurors acquitted the sheriff of charges that he ordered the beatings of parish jail prisoners and orchestrating a brazen cover-up.
Ackal’s indictment said the sheriff never disciplined the deputies who allegedly beat Roche in 2010 in retaliation for assaulting one of their supervisors, Gerald Savoy.
Ackal, Savoy and three deputies who testified about Roche’s beating are named as defendants in his lawsuit.