Outflanked X: The Barr Outflankening
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The Department of Justice is effectively ignoring language in the CARES Act authorizing it to release nonviolent offenders rather than sending them to prisons where they’re highly likely to contract COVID-19:
Andrea Circle Bear of the Cheyenne River Sioux will never get to watch her baby grow up. She died more than three weeks after having an emergency C-section while on a ventilator, a victim of the coronavirus and a cruel justice system that saw fit to send a woman eight and a half months pregnant to a crowded federal women’s prison in Fort Worth. She had received a two-year sentence on a minor, nonviolent drug charge. She had just turned 30.
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When disease enters a prison, it spreads like fire through a dry barn, infecting people in and around the facility, including correctional officers and surrounding communities. Look to the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio: Nearly 80 percent of prisoners there, almost 2,000 people, have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with more than 160 corrections officers and staff members. Five prisoners and one corrections officer have died. Public health authorities report at least 112 cases of “community spread,” including 66 cases in the surrounding area that are directly linked to the prison outbreak.
Even Congress saw the risk, which is why Republicans and Democrats united to include language in the CARES Act giving the Justice Department the discretion to release to home confinement certain prisoners.
Instead, federal authorities issued confusing guidance memos, each more confusing than the next, all amounting to little more than dense language intended to obfuscate delay tactics and inaction, obstruct the will of Congress and the president, and ignore advice from national health experts.
There is a direct link to Andrea Circle Bear’s preventable death.Her case could have taken a number of paths. The prosecutor could have declined to pursue such a low-level, rarely prosecuted drug offense. The judge could have suspended her sentence and allowed her to report to prison after she gave birth or after the Covid-19 pandemic subsided. The Bureau of Prisons could have allowed her to serve her sentence in home confinement. She could have been granted compassionate release.
I am beginning to question whether Bill Barr is an institutionalist committed above all to restoring the rule of law.