The pandemic is a three-alarm fire inside the federal prisons .
constellation of health problems — heart disease , diabetes , obesity , and high blood pressure — that experts say make him vulnerable to COVID-19 . Samuda was an easy target for the disease . Bad news about the virus swirled through the prison like mold in the ventilation system . A friend of Samuda telephoned me at the Federal Defender Program . She urged us to help .
The pandemic has invented experts in all of us . Zoom-hosting . Bread-baking . Wifiboosting . Landscaping . Epidemiology . And compassionate-release motions .
Our federal court community , the Northern District of Georgia , has a new tool : the federal compassionate-release statute , 18 U . S . C . § 3582 ( c )( 1 )( A ). Like a small country tucked into the far corner of a world map , the statute is one that many us of never heard of until now and , most of all , had never visited . But in recent months , the passports of judges , clerks , prosecutors , probation officers , and defense lawyers are filled with stamps from this new land .
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Martin Luther King , Jr ., wrote that “[ w ] e are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality , tied in a single garment of destiny . Whatever affects one directly , affects all indirectly .” Indeed , if you know someone who works at the federal courthouse or the Federal Defender Program or a federal prison , he or she has surely left fingerprints on at least one compassionate-release case .
Once a federal judge imposes a sentence , that sanction is often set in stone . Federal law permits few exceptions . Yet under Section 3582 ( c )( 1 )( A ), a court may reduce a defendant ’ s sentence if he shows “ extraordinary and compelling reasons ,” and if the facts of his crime and personal history show he is a safe bet to succeed outside prison walls .
Until recently , the remedy was invoked rarely , nearly to the vanishing point . Congress first penned Section 3582 ( c )( 1 )( A ) in the mid- 1980 ’ s , but the statute sat unused for three decades . Under the terms of the statute , only the Bureau of Prisons , not a defendant and not his lawyer , was permitted to file a motion for reduction in sentence . But that hardly ever happened . For example , in the five years leading up to 2018 , more than three thousand federal inmates asked wardens to file a motion for reduction in sentence , but the BOP did so only 80 times . The agency filed such motions only for terminally ill inmates and , even among that population , did so sparingly .
All of that changed in December 2018 , when Congress passed , and the President signed , the First Step Act . Forty pages into the bill , the authors penned Section 603 and titled it “ Increasing the Use and Transparency of Compassionate Release .” The Act amended Section 3582 ( c )( 1 )( A ) by removing the BOP and the wardens as gatekeepers of compassionate-release motions . No longer must an inmate ’ s fate rest solely in the hands of his jailers .
The First Step Act is a tale of political comity and the strangest of bedfellows , including Kim Kardashian , Van Jones , and Jared Kushner . The genesis of the Act includes many protagonists of all political stripes , both inside and outside the White House . Indeed , the Senate passed the bill by a count of 87-12 and the House by a vote of 358-36 . On December 21 , 2018 , the President signed the bill into law .
On that day , neither the President , nor the law ’ s sponsors , could have known , a mere year before the pandemic swept the nation , what a remedy they gave to the future . They invented a cure before they knew of a disease .
In March 2020 , while the pandemic gathered like storm clouds on the courthouse ’ s horizon , compassionate-release motions began to trickle into the clerk ’ s office like the first drops of rain . The prisons are filled with medically-fragile inmates and their lives were suddenly imperiled by the pandemic . A flood of motions was imminent , and the courthouse leapt into preventive action . Chief Judge Thomas W . Thrash , Jr ., signed a standing order , through which he appointed the Federal Defender Program to review each compassionate-release motion filed in the courthouse and intervene where we saw fit .
Like a chief medical officer in a field hospital , Stephanie A . Kearns , Executive Director of the Federal Defender Program , built a protocol and enlisted the entire office to join the war effort . We reached out to former clients whom we recalled suffer from serious medical ailments . We fielded letters and phone calls from more former clients and many others . Prisoner-rights organizations sent potential clients our way . And , of course , the court appointed us to review each of the hundreds of pro se motions mailed directly from prisons to the court .
Here is the review protocol : We gather a client ’ s medical records ( care of the lawyers at the Bureau of Prisons ), prison records ( including education , work , and disciplinary history ), presentence report ( care of the United States Probation Office ), and more . We then sort the cases into two groups . For those clients who suffer from a chronic health condition that renders them more vulnerable to the COVID-19 disease ( per CDC guidelines ), we will opt in . With few exceptions , the Federal Defender Program will represent such a client and file a formal motion . On other hand , when a client is healthy , we will not . We must draw the line there so that we may spend all our time and
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