Jan. 6 Defendant Released After Investigation Finds Mistreatment of Prisoners

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

We reported last month when U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth held D.C. jail officials in contempt of court for denying the rights of one of the Jan. 6 defendants, because officials refused to turn over medical records so that the defendant could get proper treatment for a broken hand. 

Lamberth asked for an investigation into the conditions the detainees were experiencing at the D.C jail. U.S. Marshals then conducted a surprise inspection last month.

The report from that inspection is now in and according to the judge, it is not good.

As a consequence, Lamberth has now ordered the release of one of the detainees, Christopher Worrell — that man whose rights the judge had already said were violated. In addition to the issue with Worrell’s hand, he needs treatment for cancer. Lamberth said he had “zero confidence that the D.C. jail” would give him the treatment needed and would “not retaliate” against him. Worrell is now on home detention with a GPS monitor.

Lamberth called the conditions in the jail “deplorable” and “beyond belief” in response to the report from the U.S. Marshals

Some 400 prisoners are being moved out of the jail after the “deplorable” conditions were uncovered. According to CNN, the Marshals’ report found that water was being shutoff in many cells “for punitive reasons” for days at a time, toilets were clogged, and an inmate who had been pepper-sprayed was “unable to wash the spray off for days, leading to an infection.”

The D.C. Department of Corrections staff were “antagonizing detainees” and “directing detainees to not cooperate with” U.S. Marshals during the inspection, the agency said, and “[o]ne DOC staffer was observed telling a detainee to ‘stop snitching.’”

The 400 detainees are being transferred to a federal facility in Pennsylvania.

Most of the Jan. 6 defendants were being held in another facility, the Central Treatment Facility, not the D.C. jail.

According to the Washington Examiner:

Many of the Capitol riot detainees have been held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours per day, allegedly in part for COVID-19 mitigation, an arrangement that has drawn bipartisan criticism from political figures such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Unfortunately, many don’t care if Jan. 6 detainees are mistreated. While Joe Biden and Democrats like to talk about Jan. 6, this is a subject that they don’t seem to what to address.

Meanwhile, as we noted before, reports indicated that the FBI doesn’t believe that there was any central coordination of groups or prominent supporters of Trump that were directly involved in the criminal actions at the Capitol, blowing up the narrative of the Democrats and some media.