The plan took a detour on the evening of Aug. 9, 2011, when a group of corrections officers savagely beat him after mistakenly believing that Williams had hurled curse words at them earlier on the cellblock. Williams sustained two broken legs, a broken collarbone and a fractured eye socket in the assault. At a hospital in Buffalo, doctors inserted several screws into one badly mangled leg.
In March of this year, three guards pleaded guilty to official misconduct in the episode and agreed to give up their prison jobs in exchange for an agreement that they would serve no time behind bars.