Even the Jan. 6 defendants deserve proper treatment
Jail is not a pleasant place to live.
That’s pretty obvious to most folks. But that reality appears to have come as a revelation to some of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants.
“They’re running a jail, not a hotel,” Judge Emmet Sullivan said in a hearing Wednesday regarding complaints from riot defendants about conditions, according to CNN. “Some people want hotel services.”
Shades of the QAnon Shaman. Remember him? Also known as Jacob Chansley of Phoenix, he stood tall in the Capitol invasion mob in his Viking-like horned helmet. Before he eventually pleaded guilty to a felony obstruction charge, he made news by requesting a special organic diet in the D.C. correctional facility — and, with court approval, receiving it.
A tougher case has been brought by Christopher Worrell, a member of the alt-right Proud Boys who is claiming mistreatment by District of Columbia jail officials.
He is charged with four felonies, including storming the Capitol and assaulting police with pepper spray gel, a reminder of how more than 100 police officers were injured. Five later died, four by suicide.
Still, like any other defendant under the Constitution, Worrell is entitled to receive proper medical care. Under that principle, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held two D.C. corrections officials in civil contempt Wednesday for their “inexcusable” delays in getting medical care to Worrell.
Although the judge quite properly thinks Worrell’s case has merit, many familiar with the long history of problems at the deteriorating 45-year-old D.C. jail agree that scrutiny of the facility should not be limited to this one case.
As The Washington Post editorialized, “Why was no attention paid to the problems when it was poor Black and Hispanic people complaining?”
Why indeed? There’s a need for such probes in prison systems across the nation, especially in these pandemic times.
Densely packed prisons and jails, after decades of mass incarceration policies, provide fertile breeding grounds for the deadly virus. The death rate from COVID-19 in prisons is more than double that of the general population.
More than 2,800 have died of COVID-19 in state and federal prisons and almost 438,000 have been infected, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
In Washington, the buck-passing over jail conditions doesn’t stop, but it recently gained more attention with the addition of a predominantly white Trump-supporting population in what long has been a mostly Black and poor population.
It also seems to have raised a new awareness of how sluggishly the corrections system can operate to serve defendants of any color.
“Does no one care?” Lamberth asked of jail officials as he called their treatment of Worrell “incompetent” and “inexcusable.”
That’s not to say Worrell is a model citizen with an airtight complaint.
In a court filing, federal prosecutors said he has “invented” many of his medical needs. His claims of poor treatment for his cancer, prosecutors argue, have “repeatedly been contradicted or unsubstantiated by the medical records” of the doctors who have seen him.
Still, he has a right to be heard and receive a full examination of his allegations, even as prosecutors are pursuing the charges against him. Those are his rights, ironically under the same Constitution that the Jan. 6 mob tried to violate.