Jan. 6 Political Prisoners Chemically Attacked By Prison Guards: Court Filing

Multiple Jan. 6 political prisoners were taken out of their cells on stretchers at the District of Columbia jail on Nov. 11, indicated a court filing.

The situation began when after a defendant refused to wear a mask, a family member of Kelly Meggs, who is being held in the D.C. jail, told Meggs’s lawyer. Prison guards then sprayed a chemical substance at the defendant described as “some kind of mace or pepper spray,” according to a filing in federal court.
“They sprayed mace or some type of gas at an inmate and kept missing so it went into an intake that fed into other cells, and the lady with the key left because she didn’t like the gas, so the inmates in the cells who were being fed the gas from that intake were locked in for like 15 minutes while it was going into their rooms and they couldn’t see or breathe,” the family told Jonathon Moseley, the lawyer.

Multiple Jan 6. defendants were taken out of the cells on stretchers following the incident.

The news was first broken by reporter Julie Kelly on November 11th.

Rumors of the treatment of January 6th defendants currently awaiting federal trial & prosecution have indicated that there is likely cruel treatment of the inmates occurring, much of it behind closed doors. These rumors appear to have at least some truth to them, with a defendant released from pretrial custody just last week due to an order from a U.S. District Court. Judge Royce Lamberth cited the failure of the jail to provide proper medical care as his chief reasoning for the release.

The U.S. Marshals Service also took action to tour the prisons at an unannounced date in mid-October. Officials deemed that prison conditions for the Jan. 6 detainees were suitable but found other parts of the same prison that “do not meet the minimum standards of confinement.”

Lamont Ruffin, the acting U.S. Marshal for Washington DC, told Quincy Booth, director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, in a letter that he himself went to the jail and saw “evidence of systemic failures.”

Prison guards were said to routinely shut off water to cells as punishment, and many cells had “large amounts of standing human sewage (urine and feces) in the...

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