A Southern California sheriff says he will not abide by a judge’s order to release half of his county’s jail inmates, many of them violent, over coronavirus concerns.
“I have no intention of releasing any of these individuals from my custody,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said in response to the judge’s ruling last week, agreeing with an ACLU lawsuit demanding the prisoners be released. “We are going to file an appeal, and we’re going to fight it. And if the judge has any intent of releasing any one of these individuals, he will have to go through line by line, name by name, and tell me which ones he is ordering released.”
Please see my message regarding last week’s court ruling on the release of inmates, the effort to appeal the decision and how the community can help. Thank you pic.twitter.com/taJck3eqt5
— OC Sheriff Don Barnes (@OCSheriffBarnes) December 16, 2020
Barnes, who is appealing the ruling, explained that hundreds of the inmates have been charged with crimes such as murder, child molestation, and domestic violence.
“These serious offenders must be kept in custody,” Barnes wrote.
Last week, a judge ruled in favor of an ACLU lawsuit, saying that the sheriff’s “deliberate indifference to the substantial risk of serious harm from COVID-19 infection to … medically vulnerable people in [his] custody violates their rights.”
Law enforcement agencies across the country have released inmates with the stated goal of slowing the spread of the coronavirus in major cities such as Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia.
In New York City, it was reported that at least 250 of the inmates released were rearrested for other crimes at least 450 times.
