CLEVELAND — A Cuyahoga County corrections officer was arraigned Friday morning on extortion and intimidation charges for allegedly threatening fellow officers to testify on his behalf at his trial for assaulting an inmate.
Idris-Farid Clark is charged with extortion and intimidation for actions that allegedly took place last month. Court documents say Clark told a fellow corrections officer that he needed them to "testify on his behalf at his trial to the lack of training we received and how the jail is ran." Clark also said if people refused to testify for him, he would release any compromising prison videos he had of them.
Prosecutors requested Clark's bond be continued from his previous indictment, in which bond was issued at $100,000.
"We have actually caught him in the act of committing new crimes while on bond here," argued Matthew Meyer, of the state attorney general's office.
Clark's defense argued that his client has no previous record, and that a GPS tracking device would be a suitable compromise.
Judge Joan Synenberg issued Clark's bond at $5,000 for the extortion and intimidation case. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Sept. 19.
FBI investigators monitored and recorded a pair of phone calls between Clark and an anonymous corrections officer. In both calls, Clark told the officer that he possessed videos that would be implicating to that particular officer. He then asked the officer to access and provide videos from the Cuyahoga County Jail's computer server that would help in his defense. Clark also told the officer to tell other members of the corrections staff to help him provide videos.
"I'm not gonna burn for no one. If I go down, others are going down, too," Clark told the officer.
Clark was charged in April with felonious assault, assault, unlawful restraint and interfering with civil rights charges for the July 16, 2018 incident. Clark and another officer, Robert Marsh, are accused of using pepper spray on an inmate who was held in a restraint chair.
The assault was caught on a jail camera, and shows Marsh punching the inmate as she is tipped back in the restraint chair.
Clark can be seen using pepper spray foam on the inmate, who officials say was returned to her cell and barred from showering for at least a day.
