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On April 29, Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon slammed the Bureau of Prisons for dreadful conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City. Below are excerpts from her remarks at the sentencing of Tiffany Days, who faced a mandatory minimum of five years for narcotics conspiracy.
So I can’t give Ms. Days a just sentence. I can give her a five-year sentence. My hands are tied. I have to give her a five-year sentence and that I will do, 60 months. The 75 days that she spent in the SHU takes care of the other three. Ms. Days is a very educated and eloquent woman, and I have, sadly, heard, both as a sentencing judge and in my capacity as the chief judge that I’ve just relinquished, entirely too many stories like the one she just recounted on the record.
I wish that the Attorney General, whoever, head of the Bureau of Prisons and the leader of the Congress, would have heard that presentation. The single thing in the five years that I was chief judge of this court that made me the craziest was my complete and utter inability to do anything meaningful about the conditions at the MCC, especially at the MCC and the MDC, two federal correctional facilities located in the City of New York that are run by morons, which wardens cycle (through) repeatedly, never staying for longer than a few months or even a year. So there is no continuity, there is no leadership, there is no ability to get anything done. They lurch from crisis to crisis, from the gun smuggling to Jeffrey Epstein, none of which is the fault of Ms. Days or any of the other inmates I have sentenced or will sentence.
It is the finding of this Court that the conditions to which she was subjected are as disgusting, inhuman as anything I’ve heard about (in) any Colombian prison, but more so because we’re supposed to be better than that.
So if I could, Ms. Days, I would say you’ve been punished enough, and I would send you home, but I can’t. The law doesn’t allow me to sentence you to less than five years. Some of what you’ve endured has been endured by prisoners even in well-run facilities, some of it.
The fact that you haven’t been out for a year is a result of the pandemic. Nobody’s been out for a year. Nobody’s had visitors. People have gotten locked up all over the country in the SHU when they’ve gotten sick, and you had the great misfortune to not only to get COVID but to get COVID in the earliest days, when we didn’t know what we were doing. And that being so, I think you’ve suffered triply as a result.
But there is no excuse for the conditions in those two institutions. There is no excuse for the serial leadership that does not allow the office of warden to take control and get control of those facilities, that they just cycle through, most of them at the end of their careers, and it is unfair and unjust. You shouldn’t have to suffer for the incompetence of the United States Department of Justice and its subsidiary agency, the Bureau of Prisons.
I will do what I can to bring your situation to the people who, if they give a damn, might do something.
You have committed a serious crime under circumstances that were particularly difficult for me to swallow what was done and everything, but I am convinced that no good would be served by keeping you incarcerated for one minute more than I am required to do by law. And so I conclude that a mandatory minimum sentence of 60 months is hardly any different from the guidelines lower end sentence of 63 months. It is sufficient but not greater than necessary to punish you for your sins.