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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | Back issues
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Republican lawmakers assail jail conditions for those who attempted coup

A new report from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican lawmakers claims that the government is mistreating Capitol rioters because of their politics. 

WASHINGTON (CN) — Focused on 3% of the people detained at a jail where the lack of water and food and the problem of standing human waste spurred a scathing report last month from the U.S. Marshals Service, a group of Republican lawmakers slammed the conditions Tuesday as political.

“There is a two-track justice system in the United States,” the report says. “This two-tiered system is not based on race, violence, or conviction of crime, but politics.” 

With an inmate population that is almost exclusively Black, the Washington, D.C., jail has long received, and long ignored, complaints about conditions. It wasn’t until this year, following the loud complaints from about 40 or so Capitol rioters — most of whom are white, that the U.S. Marshals Service concluded that the conditions were so inhumane as to necessitate the removal of about 400 inmates.

Lawmakers have also taken notice, as Capitol rioters have complained, through their attorneys, about lack of food and water, mistreatment from guards and little to no access outside of their cells. 

“Americans should not be languishing in hideous, unconstitutional conditions waiting for access to evidence and counsel,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida said at a Tuesday press conference announcing the release of the report, likening the rioters to “prisoners of war.” 

Gaetz toured the facility in November, along with Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Paul Gosar of Arizona, but said such access only came after three visits, one congressional letter and a forced confrontation with the D.C. Mayor’s representative. 

“The physical conditions can only be described as inhumane,” Gosar said. 

Titled “Unusually Cruel: An Eyewitness Report From Inside the D.C. Jail,” the document details “atrocious” and cramped conditions, broken toilets and black mold. Several Jan. 6 defendants were interviewed for the piece, which quotes them as saying that their refusal to be vaccinated against the coronavirus has left them unable to speak with their attorneys and families or attend religious services. 

Taking an ironic position for a report on a jail where Black men represent 94.1 percent of the total inmate population, the lawmakers blasts the dissemination to Capitol rioters of what they call “racist” and “anti-American propaganda,” including literature that promotes the Nation of Islam, critical race theory and academic studies that suggest the United States perpetuates a racial caste system. 

“If they have public defenders, their public defenders hate them,” Greene said at the press conference Tuesday. “They call them White Supremacists, they tell them they have to denounce their political view and denounce Trump, they try to make them watch things and read things that are basically critical race theory.” 

The jail in Washington has a population of 1,400 inmates. As proceedings continue for those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a well-known far-right activist from Huntington Beach was sentenced Tuesday to 35 days behind bars, slightly less than the 45-day sentence that prosecutors asked for. 

Mark Simon, who claimed to local news outlets that the Capitol riot only created minor destruction, has a history of substance abuse and violated his probation in an earlier case when he traveled to Washington on Jan. 6. 

“You’re not a young guy anymore, “ U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, told Simon. “And you know you want to have a relationship with your kids. You need to ask yourself, who is the man you want to be?”

Categories / Civil Rights, Criminal, Politics

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