(READ) Treatment of jailed Capitol riot suspects under scrutiny


Many inmates in a District of Colombia jail awaiting trial for alleged crimes in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been placed in “restrictive housing,” a maximum-security designation. The designation amounts to solitary confinement, with the inmates in their cells 22-23 hours a day. That’s according to JustTheNews.com.

The following is an excerpt of the report:

A short drive from the U.S. Capitol, 1,500 inmates are stuck in their jail cells 22 hours a day. Until last month it was 23, and they were also barred from going outside.

A smaller group of inmates may have it even worse: those awaiting trial for alleged crimes in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. They’ve been placed in “restrictive housing,” a maximum-security designation.

The plight of nearby inmates has received surprisingly little attention on Capitol Hill for the better part of a year, since the District of Columbia Department of Corrections issued its “medical stay-in-place” policies for COVID-19 mitigation.

That only changed in late April, and it flipped the partisan script. Rep. James Comer, ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, demanded better treatment for the inmate population at large, while Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin spoke up for inmates accused of insurrection to keep Donald Trump in office.

The issue could complicate D.C.’s bid for statehood. “D.C.’s house is not in order, and the solution is not to grant it even more authority through statehood,” Comer said April 19 in response to a Washington Post report that characterized the jail’s COVID-19 order as “mass solitary confinement.”

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) also cited the Post report in an April 22 floor speech against D.C. statehood. Alleging the city has been “essentially torturing inmates” for more than a year, Higgins said: “That is ultimately a violation of the 8th Amendment … Is this what we can expect from a D.C. state?”

Comer requested but has not received a briefing with Mayor Muriel Bowser about jail conditions, prompting him to demand Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney hold an emergency hearing on “these gross abuses that are happening right at our doorstep.”

The Jan. 6 defendants are being held in pretrial detention on charges ranging from knowingly entering or remaining in restricted grounds without authority to conspiracy, assault and obstruction of an official proceeding.

Asked about Jan. 6 defendants specifically, Comer’s office provided Just the News a statement Friday night. “Reports that January 6 defendants, who have been charged but not yet convicted of a crime, [are] receiving even harsher treatment is equally appalling,” he said. 

Both Bowser and Maloney “have refused the requests asked of them,” according to Comer. A spokesperson for Maloney connected Just the News with an Oversight staffer, who has not responded, while Bowser’s spokesperson has not responded.

A Department of Corrections spokesperson did not answer email questions and declined to speak on the record in a phone interview.

A lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants told Politico that lawmakers should contact him if they were concerned about the inmates’ treatment. Marty Tankleff, himself exonerated after decades in prison for a wrongful murder conviction, told Just the News no one has contacted him nearly three weeks later.

His clients include Ryan Samsel, who alleges a prison guard beat him so badly he suffered permanent eye damage, and Edward Jacob Lang, an observant Jew who claims guards disparaged him as a “false prophet” as he prayed for other inmates.

Singled out to ‘punish’ or ‘break them so that they will cooperate’

In a March order denying a defendant’s removal from restrictive housing, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the D.C. attorney general had placed all Jan. 6 defendants in such housing “for their own safety and the safety of the jail,” Politico reported.

“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren told Politico a month later. The Massachusetts Democrat fears the Jan. 6 defendants are being singled out to “punish” them or “break them so that they will cooperate” with federal prosecutors.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the report:

https://justthenews.com/government/local/dc-jail-treatment-capitol-riot-defendants-draws-bipartisan-outrage?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter


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8 thoughts on “(READ) Treatment of jailed Capitol riot suspects under scrutiny”

    1. I’m European, so I’m used to jail sentences in the 2-12 year scale, and life only when there’s evidence that the convicted murderer is such a mad mess that he’d go after little girls after getting out.

      Something like Anders Behring Breivik, who went after girls and was jailed, and probably won’t get out.

      I’m perfectly happy letting out people who were not carrying firearms into the Capitol, and I’m perfectly happy jailing people who killed people there. However, the only known killer, an African American bracelet-wearing man who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, has not been indicted let alone in solitary confinement. He was lauded. That would not happen in the EU. There’d be an investigation, a real public investigation, and this kind of cowboy justice would probably not be tolerated.

      There are two big takeaways in here.

      D-voting class, which includes a lot of academia, journalists, and celebrities, controls the narrative, not only in the USA, but in much of rest of the Western world including the EU, and Australia. Of course, D-people don’t vote DNC in Europe, but to effect what they do is often largely similar.

      While not all Democrats actually believe what they say, the in-group effect is very strong in Democrats. Only losers such as Warren may actually speak the truth to power. Democrats, or their EU-relatives do not seek enemies inside their Palestine-loving, climate change drivelling, race centric, open border maniacs. Instead, they pick up a conservative enemy, and blame it on everything, such as violence committed by Hamas, weather related random events, hoardes of people suddenly appearing at the border, or any act of violence where the victim is not a white male.

      It is unnecessary for Democrats to censor the media, because the ‘journalists’ are *mostly* actually either political hacks, or cowering accomplices who push contrary thinking away.

      Twitter and Facebook owners feel bad. They have created platforms which give an actual possibility to disagree. This is also the reason why the media feels to compelled to be even more partisan. They know that Rumble, Parler, Signal and so on might some day totally break the partisan media domination by the left-leaning journalist class, disarming its power for good.

      I’ve been looking at the populist/conservative movements in Europe in horror. Not because they’re bad people. They did not only totally fail to get any support from the partisan media, their opposition has rather strengthened the media partisanship by providing a common enemy to the left.

  1. Edward Jacob Lang is a violent traitorous terrorist. He repeatedly attacked police officers with a baseball bat, wearing a gas mask and riot shield. He openly and publicly called for death and violence. After January 6, he actively recruited others to join him in further terrorism. He has a long history of violence, criminality and substance abuse.

    He deserves Guantanamo or worse.

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