For two and half years, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has lived in solitary confinement, with nearly no ability to communicate with the outside world.
Now, with Guzman allegedly showing symptoms of “mental fatigue” and “sleep deprivation,” and “daily headaches and ear pain,” his defense team had several requests for U.S.
District Judge Brian Cogan earlier this month: two hours of outdoor exercise every week, traditional commissary access, permission to buy six bottles of water a week and earplugs.
"This deprivation of sunlight and fresh air, over an excessive 27-month period, is causing psychological scarring,” the letter said. It called the conditions “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Federal prosecutors were not convinced.
According to new court filings obtained by The Washington Post, the government opposed all of the above and alleged the request was part of a ploy to escape from prison or silence cooperating witnesses.
“The size of the defendant’s cell, the parameters of his window, the presence of phantom music and the television programming available to the defendant during his daily hour of exercise,” the government wrote, were not “constitutional concerns.”
Furthermore, commissary items are considered dangerous in the hands of high-risk inmates, since they can be weaponized, the prosecutor argues.
Jeffrey Lichtman, one of the lawyers on Guzman’s defense team, called the prosecution’s response, due Thursday, “literally hysterical.”
Tags
news