Anthony Buntyn, Willful Due Process Violation, New Mexico 2022

Anthony Buntyn, 55, a former prisoner transport officer, was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison for willfully violating the due process rights of detainees in his custody during a cross-country transport through New Mexico. The conviction, handed down by a federal jury on September 28, 2022, exposed a pattern of systemic abuse and retaliation against vulnerable individuals chained inside a sweltering transport van.

Court documents reveal Buntyn, employed by Prisoner Transportation Services of America (PTS), used his authority to inflict pain and humiliation. On a March 2017 transport, he retaliated against detainees who complained about extreme heat by cranking up the van’s heater, denying meals and water, and forcing unresponsive detainees into a small segregation cage for hours at a time. The van, traveling through the scorching southwestern desert, became a mobile torture chamber under his command.

Detainees were denied restroom breaks so routinely that they were left with no choice but to urinate in bottles or on the van floor. Buntyn, acting as supervising officer, enforced these conditions deliberately, according to trial evidence. Prosecutors argued that his actions were not oversights but calculated punishments meant to assert dominance and silence complaints.

The case only came to light after the Shawnee County Detention Center in Topeka, Kansas, flagged the detainees’ condition upon arrival and alerted the FBI. “If not for the Detention Center notifying the FBI of the detainees’ condition upon arrival, the FBI may have never known or been able to seek justice for these victims,” said Special Agent in Charge Charles Dayoub of the FBI’s Kansas City Field Office.

“Prisoner transport officers, even when they are employed by private companies, must abide by the laws and protect the constitutional rights of the people in their custody,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The department will continue to vigorously enforce our nation’s laws to ensure that officers who break the law — including those who are driving the nation’s backroads in prisoner transport vans and may therefore wrongly believe they can act with impunity — are held accountable.”

U.S. Attorney Alexander M.M. Uballez for the District of New Mexico emphasized that detainees “are entitled to basic human dignity.” Buntyn will serve 1 year of supervised release upon release from prison. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly A. Brawley and Trial Attorney Laura Gilson, with assistance from Special Litigation Counsel Samantha Trepel, following an investigation led by the FBI’s Kansas City Field Office.

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