FREE MICHAEL AVENATTI

You may not like him. Like Icarus he flew too close to the sun and crashed to earth. (for those robed readers who are befuddled by literary and mythology references, click here).  He's a blow-hard and he probably stole money from clients. But as everyone's favourite federal blogger David O Markus writes here in The Hill, Avenatti is being wrongly held at the notorious SHU 10-South at MCC in NYC.

MCC holds about 800 inmates. It was designed for 400. In 10 South it is freezing; the lights are kept on 24 hours a day and when the toilets break, which is often, inmates are given bags to defecate in.  

"If I described these conditions to you—filthy, freezing, no natural light, isolation so extreme that you're punished for speaking through the walls, absurd rules like prisoners not getting to see the newspapers unless they're 30 days old, secrecy so deep that people are force-fed and lawyers can be punished for describing the conditions their clients are experiencing—you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was Iran or Russia," Jeanne Theoharis, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, told Gothamist. "But in fact this gulag exists right here in lower Manhattan."

The segregated units are horrifying and inhumane," David Patton, the executive director of Federal Defenders of New York, an organization that provides low cost or free legal help to people charged with federal crimes, told the Times. "If you wanted to intentionally design a place to drive people mad, you'd be hard-pressed to do better."

There is no reason that any defendant being charged in a  non-violent fraud case should be held in such conditions. He does not represent a danger to anyone. For those of you interested, there is a South Florida connection- Avenatti is being represented by Howard and Scott Srebnick in his nNw York criminal case.