A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy to nearly five years in prison for violating a detainee’s civil rights by forcefully shoving the heavily restrained man headfirst into a wall, resulting in a head wound and serious spinal injury to the victim.
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Jeremiah “Jerry” Manuyag Flores, 45, was convicted by a jury late last year in San Diego federal court on charges of deprivation of rights under the color of law and falsifying a record in a federal investigation.
Prosecutors told a judge in sentencing documents that his “conduct was an outrageous abuse of power” and that a seven-year sentence was the “absolute minimum necessary” to accomplish federal sentencing goals. Defense attorneys argued that Flores was an Air Force veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who made a serious but brief mistake that should cost him just one year in custody.
U.S. District Judge Linda Lopez sentenced him to four years and nine months.
Flores was first hired by the Sheriff’s Office in 2021 to be a security guard at a shooting range, but he later attended a law enforcement academy and became a deputy in February 2023. He was placed on administrative leave in August 2024 amid an internal investigation that concluded his actions were likely criminal. The Sheriff’s Office forwarded the case to prosecutors, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego secured a grand jury indictment early last year.
Flores went to trial on those charges twice last year, with the first ending in a mistrial when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision and deadlocked. A second jury took just two hours to deliberate before convicting Flores on both counts.
Flores was suspended without pay at the time of his conviction, according to sheriff’s officials. His employment status was not known Tuesday.
The use of excessive force occurred Aug. 29, 2024, in the bowels of the downtown San Diego Central Courthouse, where Flores had been working for about 18 months. He was assigned to escort restrained inmates from a basement detention area to holding cells on different floors of the building.
Prosecutors said that after one hearing, Flores became increasingly agitated with a slow-moving inmate identified in court papers as J.P. In part because of J.P.’s mental health issues, the 57-year-old was heavily restrained with his ankles chained together, his wrists folded across his front and chained to his waist, and a chain connecting the wrist restraints and ankle restraints.
The jury found that Flores mocked J.P. and bickered with him before forcefully shoving him into a holding cell, where J.P. stumbled forward, slammed headfirst into a wall, and then fell and struck his head against a bench. Prosecutors said J.P. ultimately ended up slumped on the floor, where he remained for two hours without moving. He was later taken to a hospital, where doctors determined he had a spinal fracture that eventually required surgery and months of hospitalization.
The jury found that Flores then failed to write a report on his use of force, as was required by agency policy, and when he did finally write a different kind of report on the incident, he made several false statements, including an assertion that he did not use force.
“The Defendant abused his authority as a law enforcement officer, callously injured a defenseless detainee without concern for his wellbeing, and lied in an effort to escape any accountability whatsoever,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Seth Askins and Michael Deshong wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Flores was the second San Diego sheriff’s deputy since May to be sentenced in San Diego federal court for violating the civil rights of a victim, following the 12-year sentence handed down to Aaron Richard Russell in the 2020 shooting death of a fleeing detainee outside the downtown Central Jail.
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Defense attorney Jeremy Warren, who represents both Russell and Flores, argued in both cases that prosecutors had made unusual decisions to charge the deputies with civil rights violations for brief, one-off choices.
“This is not the typical civil rights case involving an officer targeting a citizen due to racial or some other personal animus, or using repeated force over a prolonged period of time, or immediately escalating a situation by resorting to a weapon when other methods were available,” Warren and two other defense attorneys argued on behalf of Flores in a sentencing memorandum. “The conduct was confined to a singular, discrete, momentary interaction, not a pattern of behavior or a sustained use of force.”
The defense attorneys wrote that Flores violated J.P.’s constitutional rights “in a narrow, fact-specific way during a rapidly evolving situation, not as part of a broader disregard for constitutional limits with malicious intent.”
The defense team also argued that Flores’ personal history and characteristics, including his service in the Air Force and his lack of any prior criminal history, warranted a significantly shorter sentence than the one recommended by prosecutors.
But Askins and Deshong argued that Flores had “suffered reductions in rank due to three instances of misconduct” while in the Air Force, and that having joined the Sheriff’s Office in his 40’s, he was “not a youthful individual lacking in real world experience.”
The prosecutors also argued that his excessive use of force was made worse by his subsequent attempts to cover up his conduct, which they argued was only discovered by “pure coincidence” and thanks to the diligence of sheriff’s Sgt. Omar Vega-Armenta.
Three days after Flores injured J.P. and then made false statements on his report, Vega-Armenta was working overtime guarding J.P. at the hospital when he happened to overhear the inmate tell medical personnel he’d been shoved by a deputy while restrained, according to the prosecutors.
Part of Vega-Armenta’s normal duties at the courthouse included reviewing use-of-force incidents, but he didn’t recall reviewing a report involving J.P., so he immediately contacted a supervisor to look for surveillance footage of the incident J.P described.
“But for Sergeant Vega’s diligence, Defendant’s abuse of power may have gone completely undetected as a result of his failure to report the incident to a supervisor, his failure to write the official use of force report, and his false statements in the (inmate status report) that he was directed to write,” the prosecutors wrote in a footnote of their sentencing memorandum.
Flores, who was allowed to stay out of custody before reporting to prison next month, has the ability to appeal both his conviction and his sentence.
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