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No Indictments in Prison Sex Slave Case

Yesterday we wrote about Roderick Johnson, a black, gay male who endured being raped in a Texas prison nearly every day by more than 100 men over an 18 month period.

Today we learn that a Texas grand jury has refused to indict anyone in the case.

Gina DeBottis, the chief of the state's Special Prosecution Unit that prosecutes prison crimes, said the grand jury considered allegations concerning sexual assault by convicts and organized criminal activity. None of the 49 convicts alleged to have committed the attacks against Roderick Johnson was indicted, she said Thursday.

In April 2002, seeking compensation, Johnson filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and more than a dozen prison officials. He alleged officials looked the other way while he was repeatedly beaten and raped by prison gangs who sold him as a sex slave while he was incarcerated at the Allred Unit near Wichita Falls. The lawsuit is pending in federal court in Wichita Falls.

Prison officials have denied the allegations and on Thursday for the first time made public their investigative report refuting Johnson's allegations with new ones -- that he had consensual sex with several of the alleged attackers, that he concocted his story for money, that he even wrote letters to two convicts he alleged raped him.

He consented to sex with "several" of the inmates? What about the remaining ones who raped him? Out of the 49 inmates investigated, not one was indicted. Not a single guard or prison official. We smell a whitewash.

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