“Swing or Kick Rocks”: BOP Guard Alleges Conspiracy to Brutalize Prisoners at Kentucky Lockup
Former federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guard Lt. Terry L. Melvin was not the first to admit brutalizing a prisoner at the United States Penitentiary (USP) in Big Sandy, Kentucky. But with his guilty plea on January 24, 2025, Melvin also made a startling claim: That assaulting prisoners was a “commonplace occurrence” at the high-security lockup because unofficial policy condoned it as a method of limiting the number of prisoners in protective custody (PC).
Melvin’s plea agreement said that he was part of the conspiracy from early 2021 to March 2022. Curiously, that was after the BOP agreed to pay prisoner Jonathan Lee Smith $35,000 to settle claims that he was shot in the leg and put in overly tight restraints by Melvin and a fellow lieutenant named Barker, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2023, p.44.]
The former guard also named fellow former staffers who participated in the scheme: Samuel Patrick, Clinton Pauley, Kevin Pearce Jr. and Ryan Elliott. Pearce was sentenced to a year of supervised release in December 2023 for covering up three prisoner assaults by two subordinates, Patrick, then 41, and Pauley, then 42; as PLN also reported, they were sentenced in November 2023 to 36 and 40 months in prison, respectively, while Elliott was sentenced to a year and a day in March 2024 for lying for them and also assaulting yet another prisoner himself. [See: PLN, July 2024, p.12.]
More disturbingly, Melvin said that the conspiracy went almost to the top of USP-Big Sandy’s hierarchy, involving an associate warden and guard captain identified as E.E. and M.D. Those two leaders imported from previous BOP postings a policy known as “swing or kick rocks”: Whenever a prisoner requested PC, a guard gave him two choices—fake an assault on the guard or withdraw the PC request. The latter would leave him to fend for himself in the prison population, of course. The former would trigger a guard beatdown, but also a transfer to another lockup.
One day a week was reserved when prisoners who requested PC were presented this Hobson’s choice, Melvin said; it became known as “staff assault day.” Participating, guards were rewarded with cash bonuses, of which he admitted receiving a total of $6,000 to $8,000 in October 2021 alone. The disgraced guard also said that E.E. ordered BOP investigators looking into the violence against prisoners to “clean this shit up”—including by tampering with video evidence or forging fake details in official reports.
In response, BOP defended its commitment to rooting out staff-on-prisoner violence, of course. Meanwhile Melvin faces up to 10 years in prison each count that he pleaded guilty to: depriving a prisoner of his Eighth Amendment right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment; and conspiracy to violate a prisoner’s civil rights. His sentencing is currently set for November 2025. See: United States v. Melvin, USDC (E.D. Ky.), Case No. 7:25-cr-00001.
Additional source: Lexington Herald Leader
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