A defendant serving time in a state prison for hurling courtroom chairs at a local judge reacted to a sentencing in another local case by flipping over a courtroom defense table before being hauled away by Bartholomew County correctional officers.
It was the third violent outburst from Jordan L. Rhoades, 21, an inmate in the Miami Correctional Facility in Peru, since he has been prosecuted in Bartholomew County for incidents in a courtroom and the county jail last year.
Rhoades was being sentenced by Bartholomew Superior Court 1 Judge Jim Worton on Wednesday afternoon on three Level 5 felony counts of battery with bodily injury to a public safety officer. Represented by public defender David A. Nowak, Rhoades had agreed to a plea bargain that limited the sentence for the three felonies to not exceed six years.
The sentence stems from a Sept. 4 incident in the jail last year when Rhoades was accused of taking metal rods from a cell door and throwing them at three county jail deputies, causing scrapes, scratches and bruises on the officers. The incident happened after another inmate was accused of kicking out a section of his cell door, and then other inmates blocked the bottom of their cell doors and allowed showers and toilets to overflow, flooding parts of the jail.
Rhoades is already serving five years in state custody for hurling chairs in the direction of Judge Kathleen “Kitty” Tighe Coriden and deputy prosecutor Jeremy Fisk during a court hearing in Bartholomew Superior Court 2 on Feb. 9, 2017.
For more on this story, see Thursday’s Republic.
