Private prison van driver, accused of raping St. Paul woman he was transporting, gets 30 years for similar attacks

A former private prisoner transport officer accused by a St. Paul woman of raping her as he drove her from Texas to the Ramsey County jail has received a 30-year prison term for similar attacks involving three other female inmates.

Marquet D. Johnson, 45, of West Memphis, Ark., was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque, N.M., after pleading guilty to the assaults that occurred during long-distance transports over a four-month period in 2019.

The lawsuit filed in April against Ramsey County and its Sheriff’s Office, which contracted with Johnson’s employer, Inmate Services Corp., alleged that Johnson raped a 38-year-old woman while driving her from Texas to Minnesota in June 2019. Lawyers are due back in court on April 29 for a hearing addressing “a substantial amount of additional evidence,” said the woman’s attorney, Paul Applebaum.

Johnson has not been charged in connection with the St. Paul woman’s allegations. But the investigation in New Mexico alerted prosecutors “to more than a dozen other alleged victims of Mr. Johnson’s conduct” across the country while he was employed by the now-defunct Inmate Services in 2019 and 2020, according to a filing in March in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque.

The first of the three rapes that Johnson admitted to in court occurred in July 2019. While driving a woman from Spencer, Ind., to San Marcos, Texas, he assaulted her in a bathroom at the headquarters of Inmate Services in West Memphis.

In August 2019, while driving an inmate from Baker County, Ore., to Warrensburg, Mo., Johnson assaulted a woman inside the van while parked outside a Missouri hotel.

Then in November 2019, while transporting an inmate from Santa Fe, N.M., to Delta County, Colo., Johnson pressed a gun against another woman’s head and raped her in the van.

After that victim came forward, federal investigators discovered another 12 women were subjected to “some former of sexual misconduct” by Johnson while under transport.

“These 12 additional victims have never met each other,” read a prosecution filing ahead of sentencing. “Nonetheless, their harrowing accounts eerily mirror each other.”

In July, a second former Inmate Services driver was sentenced to nine years in prison for raping a Washington inmate at a Missouri rest stop while driving her to a Minnesota jail.

The prosecution said Rogeric Hankins, 37, picked up a pretrial inmate from an Olympia, Wash., jail on March 31, 2020. Three days later, he stopped the van they were traveling in at a gas station in Joplin, Mo., and brought the victim to the women’s bathroom. He then led her into the men’s bathroom, ordered her into the stall farthest from the door and raped her.