Even the Jan. 6 Mob 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 jail 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 over 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 of them 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 on Wednesday for their “inexcusable” delays in getting medical care to Worrell.

Although the judge quite properly thinks Worrell’s case has merit, many of those who are 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 about the conditions?”

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, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

More than 2,800 have died of COVID-19 in state and federal prisons across the country and almost 438,000 have been infected, the Initiative reports in October.

In Cook County, hundreds of people who have been convicted and sentenced to prison are being held in the overcrowded Cook County Jail while Sheriff Tom Dart argues in the courts with state prison officials over his request to have the state take 500 inmates off his hands.

Dart has said the extra inmates have cost his department more than $38 million, some of which has been covered by the federal government during the pandemic. But state officials don’t want the inmates on their hands either.

Back 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 that 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 so desperately to violate.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)