Ex-GA deputy bragged about arresting Black voters. That’s not why he’s going to prison
An ex-Georgia sheriff’s deputy who before becoming a cop in recent years had, according to the FBI, boasted of charging Black Georgians with felonies to keep them from voting, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court on an illegal-gun charge.
Cody Richard Griggers, of Montrose, a former deputy in Wilkinson County east of Macon, pleaded guilty in April to one count of possession of an unregistered, short-barrel shotgun.
On Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in downtown Macon, Griggers, 28, was ordered to serve three years and eight months in prison. He had faced a maximum penalty of 10 years behind bars.
At Tuesday’s sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Tilman E. “Tripp” Self III told the 28-year-old Griggers that he was “not being sentenced for the words you have said. ... But the words that you have used are not the words of a patriot. They’re the words of a coward.”
Griggers, a former Marine, sobbed as he addressed the court on his own behalf.
He apologized to his family and others, adding that things he had said in text messages the FBI discovered “were jokes,” but that he knows “it’s nothing to joke about. ... It has a real impact.”
Griggers added that things he said were “not right” and that he was sorry to bring discredit to the police and the people close to him.
Griggers fired after FBI investigation
The former deputy was fired last November after the FBI contacted Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman about an investigation into Grigger’s alleged ties to a California man said to have made violent political statements on Facebook.
Federal authorities discovered the illegal shotgun during a search of Griggers’ home last summer. He pleaded guilty to the firearms charge in April.
As The Telegraph first reported this spring, the text messages that, according to an FBI affidavit, linked Griggers, who is white, with members of an alleged extremist group included a claim that he had beaten a Black person he arrested.
Chatman, who is Black, said earlier this year that there was no evidence that such an incident occurred. Chatman said he had concluded that Griggers’ claim was perhaps Griggers “being braggadocious.”
The text messages noted in the FBI affidavit appear to have been sent in the months before Griggers began working as a sheriff’s deputy.
Investigating ‘Shadow Moses’
Griggers’ name surfaced last August when federal agents searched the cellphone of a San Diego man and discovered group text messages with members of the texting group who referred to themselves as “Shadow Moses” or “Shadmo,” court documents state.
Grigger “also expressed viewpoints consistent with racially motivated violent extremism, including the use of racial slurs, slurs against homosexuals and making frequent positive references to the Nazi holocaust,” prosecutors said in a statement in April announcing Griggers’ guilty plea.
Prosecutors have said that on Nov. 19 the FBI searched Griggers’ sheriff’s patrol car and found a machine gun “with an obliterated serial number,” a weapon he was not allowed to have in his patrol car.
“An unregistered short barrel shotgun was (also) found in his home,” the statement said.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published August 3, 2021 at 2:03 PM.