Get Out of Jail, Free
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/merrick-garlands-jailbreak/
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The U.S. Justice Department, headed up by Attorney General Merrick Garland, announced earlier this week that thousands of federal prison inmates who were sent home due to the pandemic would not be required to return to prison to finish their terms — a reversal of an earlier opinion released by the Trump administration’s Department of Legal Counsel dictating that the federal Bureau of Prisons “must recall prisoners in home confinement to correctional facilities” if they did not meet the normal home-arrest criteria. The reversal is effectively a jailbreak, engineered by left-wing activist groups such as the ACLU and the Justice Action Network under the pretenses of public health. Reuters reports:
From March 2020 through Dec. 6 of this year, more than 35,000 inmates have been sent home under all of the BOP’s various legal powers.
As of Dec. 6, the Justice Department said that 4,879 prisoners were in extended home confinement under the CARES Act authority, and more than 2,800 would have been returned to prison once the emergency was lifted if the prior legal opinion had remained in place.
While BOP was given the power to send home low-level inmates under the CARES Act, the law was initially interpreted in narrower terms by then–Attorney General Bill Barr, whose Office of Legal Counsel said the DOJ’s release authority would expire 30 days after the pandemic emergency period had ended. Biden’s DOJ originally maintained that this was the correct interpretation of the law. But after months of pressure from activist groups, Garland arrived at an entirely different interpretation: “Based upon a thorough review of the relevant text, structure, purpose, and legislative history—and a careful consideration of BOP’s analysis of its own authority—we conclude that the better reading of . . . BOP’s preexisting authorities does not require that prisoners in extended home confinement be returned en masse to correctional facilities when the emergency period ends,” a statement from the Office of Legal Counsel reads.
