You’ve got to hand it to the ACLU. Their legendary defense of traitors, terrorists, and others who would try and destroy the United States is consistent and predictable.
Last April, the ACLU sued Orange County to release inmates who might be “medically vulnerable” to getting sick from the coronavirus. What those inmates did to be in jail didn’t matter. Can’t have a child rapist get sick and die from COVID. That would be heartless.
A judge apparently didn’t care either. He ordered the release of all medically vulnerable prisoners no matter what their crimes. He ruled that Don Barnes, the sheriff of Orange County, showed “deliberate indifference to the substantial risk of serious harm from COVID-19 infection to … medically vulnerable people in [his] custody” which “violates their rights.”
Barnes is a practical man and must have done a double-take when the judge gave that order.
“We’ve released 1,400 inmates to date since March for low-level offenders. The only inmates remaining now are serious offenders,” he explained. “Of the medically vulnerable, 90 of them are in custody for murder or attempted murder, 94 for child molestation.”
This may be why Barnes is dismissing the judge’s order and says his office will appeal.
“Everybody in the community is at risk of COVID right now,” Barnes said in response to the judge, adding, “not considering the risk to the public they present by being released back into the community, I think is not only absurd, I think it places the community at significant risk …”
“I have no intention of doing that, of releasing those individuals back into the community. I think they pose a serious threat,” Barnes told “Fox & Friends.”
And it’s not like his jail is a Petri dish for the virus.
“He got a lot of his facts incorrect,” Barnes told co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “We have been testing inmates. We have been so far ahead of the curve when it came to best practices within our jails. We mitigated our COVID crisis from 220 in March to zero as of last Monday.”
That was last Monday. According to ABC7, that number jumped to 416 as of yesterday. Barnes says the number is high because they’re testing everyone in the jails, even asymptomatic inmates.
But the ACLU made it clear in their statement that they just don’t get it.
“Public safety does not just mean crime,” said Jacob Reisberg with the ACLU. “Public safety also means, is there a hospital bed open if you get sick? And if there’s a massive outbreak in the jail, which this de-population order is trying to avoid, there will not be hospital capacity in Orange County for people on the outside who get COVID.”
The “low-level” offenders released earlier have committed crimes at three times the normal rate, according to the DA’s office. What do you think releasing murders and rapists would do to the violent crime rate?
Keep testing the inmates, separate them from the general population when they test positive, and make sure there’s no way in hell they get any kind of release.
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