Federal Defenders urge Justice Department to take specific immediate steps in response to coronavirus outbreak

I received this morning a copy of a seven-page letter sent yesterday by the Federal Public & Community Defenders to Attorney General William Barr and other Justice Department officials.  That letter (dated March 19, 20202) can be downloaded below, and here is how it started (with footnotes omitted):

We write on behalf of the Federal Public and Community Defenders.  At any given time, Defenders and other appointed counsel under the Criminal Justice Act represent 80 to 90 percent of all federal defendants because they cannot afford counsel.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has turned our nation’s jails and prisons into ticking time bombs.  These jails and prisons do not provide adequate medical care in the best of times. Many prisons and pretrial detention facilities are dramatically understaffed, and populated by individuals who are older and medically compromised.  Today, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) confirmed that two staff members were presumed positive for COVID-19, marking the first possible cases in the federal prison system.  They are surely not the last. As BOP has itself acknowledged, the risks of the rapid transmission of contagion in the tight quarters of prisons and jails present major challenges in keeping inmates and staff safe and healthy.  This stark reality has been widely recognized.

Lowering the population of prisons and jails is the simplest and most effective way to disrupt the transmission of COVID-19.  Our clients and other incarcerated individuals — along with the correctional officers, attorneys, and contractors who spend their days moving between prisons and the public — are in grave and imminent danger.

We urge you to use existing authority to take immediate and decisive action to both reduce the number of people entering federal detention and release individuals who are already incarcerated.  Failure to do so may well be a death sentence for many.

It is imperative that the Department of Justice immediately take the following two steps:

1. Direct all United States Attorneys’ Offices to minimize arrests, decline to seek detention of individuals at their initial appearance in court and consent to the release of those already detained except in cases involving a specific and substantial risk that a person will cause bodily injury to or use violent force against the person of another; and

2. Direct BOP to utilize its existing authorities under the First Step Act and Second Chance Act to maximize the use of community corrections and compassionate release.

Download 20200319--Letter to AG Barr et al. re COVID-19