California inmate says guards helped arranged sex assaults

FRESNO, Calif. — A lawyer for an inmate who says he was raped in prison said Wednesday that guards deliberately set up the assaults by putting him in a cell with a convicted murderer so notorious for abuse that he was known as the "booty bandit."

Scheduled witnesses in the federal civil rights case include Wayne Robertson, who has acknowledged raping and torturing Eddie Webb Dillard and said the guards intentionally put Dillard in his cell.

"They knew what would happen to him," Robertson said at a 1999 criminal trial in which the guards at California State Prison at Corcoran were acquitted.

Dillard claims three guards violated his civil rights by setting up the rapes over two days in March 1993 to punish him for kicking a guard at another prison. Dillard alleges that the guards — Robert Decker, Joe Sanchez and Anthony Sylva — and now-retired prison medical assistant Kathy Horton-Plant then orchestrated a cover-up by refusing to take him to a hospital and by not filing medical reports.

"As a result, Mr. Dillard never received medical care," Marina Dini, Dillard’s attorney, said in opening statements Wednesday. "There is nothing in the file to document even an allegation. … The evidence will show this was merely swept under the rug."

The California Department of Corrections, which would be responsible for any compensatory damages awarded to Dillard, contends the guards and not the agency were at fault, department spokesman Russ Heimerich said.

Attorneys for the guards said Wednesday that their clients were unaware of any problem between the two inmates, and that Dillard never complained he was in danger.

Jan Kahn, the attorney representing Sanchez, said the two inmates were on friendly terms and spent time together in the yard.

"While they were out there, they even braided one another’s hair," Kahn said Wednesday.

Department of Corrections attorney Barbara Sheldon concluded in a 2001 affidavit that the defendants "had acted … with actual malice." Investigators also said in affidavits that Robertson was listed in prison records as an enemy of Dillard. It is against department policy to house inmates with documented enemies.

Witnesses include former guard Roscoe "Bonecrusher" Pondexter, who testified at the criminal trial under a grant of immunity. He said his fellow officers knew they were endangering Dillard when they left him in a cell with the 6-foot-3, 230-pound Robertson, who is serving a life sentence for murder.

Dillard’s attorney, Robert Bastian, said department records document at least 25 instances in which Robertson assaulted or raped cellmates between April 1983 and November 1997, earning him the "booty bandit" nickname.

Dillard, who had been in prison for assault with a deadly weapon, was released in 1996 and sent back to prison in 2003 for another assault with a deadly weapon charge.

The Department of Corrections withdrew its defense of the guards but later agreed to pay for their attorneys in the civil case after the prison guards union argued that refusing to do so violated state law.