Kerry Dale Presnell Obituary, Death; – Kerry Dale Presnell, aged 36, passed away on November 14, 2024, following a violent assault at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama. Mr. Presnell was serving a 20-year sentence for property theft and was set to be eligible for parole in March 2025.
Reports from the Equal Justice Initiative indicate that Mr. Presnell was attacked by a group of fellow inmates in a dormitory and was severely beaten with a broomstick.
After the assault, Mr. Presnell was taken to the prison infirmary. However, rather than conducting an investigation into the incident or providing him with a medical assessment, the officers returned him to the dormitory.
The assault on Mr. Presnell went uninvestigated, and his assailants were not identified prior to his return to the dorm. Subsequently, he was discovered beaten and unconscious in the dormitory and was transported to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Mr. Presnell marks at least the 13th individual to be killed in an Alabama prison in 2024.
The crisis within Alabama’s prison system has now persisted for five years since the Department of Justice informed the Alabama Department of Corrections that the conditions in its facilities were unconstitutional. Over 80 individuals have been murdered in Alabama prisons during this period.
In 2019, the Justice Department alerted Alabama’s governor that the management practices of the ADOC significantly contributed to the elevated levels of violence within the state’s prisons. Attempts to secure the state’s voluntary compliance to rectify these issues were unsuccessful, leading federal prosecutors to file a lawsuit against the ADOC in 2020.
