Effective review of messiness of federal compassionate releases amidst COVID

BuzzFeed News has this great lengthy new piece on the messy realities of federal compassionate release realities during the pandemic. The full headline of the piece, which I recommend in full, provides a summary: "'I Had Hit The Lottery': Inmates Desperate To Get Out Of Prisons Hit Hard By The Coronavirus Are Racing To Court: With little legal precedent for a global pandemic, judges are deciding on a case-by-case basis how to weigh the risks of COVID-19 in prisons."  Here is an excerpt:

A BuzzFeed News review of more than 50 cases filed in the federal district court in DC showed that with little precedent for a flood of release requests during a pandemic, decisions about who gets out of prison and who does not can appear arbitrary. Prisoner advocates and defense lawyers say these cases can come down to the luck of the draw, with some judges proving to be more sympathetic than others.

Judges are making medical assessments about how much of a threat COVID-19 poses to an individual inmate and then deciding how to balance that against the public safety risk of sending that person back into the community; inmates are usually released to home confinement or under the supervision of a probation officer. And judges are reaching different conclusions about how to measure an inmate’s risk of exposure in state and federal prisons, which have seen some of the worst clusters of COVID-19 cases nationwide.

Boykin is one of more than 800 inmates who have been granted compassionate release by a federal judge since March, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Another 7,000 federal inmates have been released by the BOP to home confinement in the same period, after Attorney General Bill Barr directed the bureau to prioritize using its own release power for eligible inmates to minimize the spread of COVID-19. More than 150,000 federal inmates remain incarcerated.

Thousands of inmates are still exploring options to get out. Families Against Mandatory Minimums, just one of the groups that connect inmates with pro bono legal assistance, has fielded more than 3,000 requests for help since the start of the pandemic. They’ve been able to match approximately 1,200 inmates and family members with lawyers.

“We were hoping ... that judges would not want to be a party to this ongoing, slow massacre in the prisons. And they’re not, and that’s good,” said FAMM President Kevin Ring. However, he said, when it comes to how judges are analyzing release requests, “it’s not consistent across jurisdictions — there are some judges who have been stricter and some who have been more lenient.”