A man currently incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail has filed suit in federal court over two alleged assaults by correctional officers that his legal complaint describes as “brutal” and “vicious.”
Daronte Brown, 21, is a pretrial detainee at the jail with documented psychiatric disabilities. The complaint describes two incidents in 2023 and 2024 in which jail employees beat Brown without provocation. The complaint asserts that, after jail medical staff threw his medications to the ground and refused to replace them, and Brown verbally protested, correctional officer McKinley (the complaint does not include his first name) punched him.
“Four other officers arrived and began relentlessly beating Mr. Brown, even though he was already kneeling with his hands behind his back,” according to a release from the Abolitionist Law Center, which is representing Brown in his suit. “The complaint states the officers lifted him off the ground and repeatedly slammed his face into the walls. They stomped on his head and continued to beat him,” the release continues.
In the second incident, the complaint asserts that officer Robert Veith and sergeant Christopher Radaci entered Brown’s cell and repeatedly punched and tased him while he was handcuffed.
After both incidents, the lawsuit asserts that Brown was denied medical care and placed in solitary confinement. According to the complaint, Brown’s medical records show that jail medical staff were not permitted to have him moved from solitary confinement even though he was clearly decompensating.
In March 2024, Veith was criminally charged for assaulting Brown. He pled guilty to a lesser offense and was fined $300.
Jaclyn Kurin, a staff attorney at the Abolitionist Law Center, said that the disparity between Veith and Brown’s treatment “highlights the terrible lack of equality in the criminal law system.”
“Veith’s penalty for brutally assaulting a handcuffed African-American man with psychiatric disabilities was no more severe than a fine for a few parking tickets,” said Kurin.
Despite the fact that he is currently incarcerated in the jail and could be subject to retaliation, Brown hopes his suit can push for transparency and accountability for excessive violence at the county jail.
“I’m filing this lawsuit because I want justice,” said Brown. “I want to have my day in court to bring transparency to the beatings by corrections officers at ACJ. They need to be held accountable for assaulting me and other incarcerated people without justification. And their supervisors need to be held accountable for failing to supervise and discipline them.”
The complaint names former wardens Orlando Harper and Shane Dady as well as former deputy warden David Zetwo and former deputy chief of operations Jason Beasom, who, the suit argues “failed to adequately train, supervise and discipline ACJ correction officers for [violent] conduct, which resulted in the rampant use of unlawful and unconstitutional force on people incarcerated at ACJ.”
As a result of a 2020 class action lawsuit also brought by the Abolitionist Law Center, in 2024 Allegheny County agreed to a judicial order intended to provide mental healthcare to incarcerated people with psychiatric conditions and to curb correctional officers’ violence toward incarcerated people with disabilities.
The lawsuit claims that jail officials have “ignored the substance and intent of the order” by failing to meaningfully review officers’ “unreasonable uses of force” or “discipline or provide additional training or supervision to prevent a pattern of the County violence against incarcerated people with psychiatric disabilities.”
Jail spokesperson Jesse Geleynse said that the jail does not comment on pending litigation.
This lawsuit is ALC’s second suit this summer alleging excessive use of force by jail correctional officers. According to an ALC press release, these suits highlight a “systemic culture of violence responsible for rampant constitutional violations.”
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2025.
