Non-Violent Capitol Hill Trespasser Timothy Hale-Cusanelli’s Racist Views Do Not Justify Continued Detention Without Bail
Last week, a federal appellate court
affirmed the continued imprisonment without bond of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, one of more than 500 people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Hale-Cusanelli has now been jailed in a maximum security federal lockup for almost six months. He is kept in
23-hour-a-day isolation – conditions similar to those imposed on terrorists detained at in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
(Ironically, this fact that doesn’t seem to bother most liberals who, for anyone else,
decry solitary confinement as inhumane.)
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Bail Decision
The district court weighed the four factors and ruled that Hale-Cusanelli was so dangerous that bail was inappropriate.
Taking the four factors in turn, the court found that because Hale-Cusanelli “was not charged with any offenses involving violence or destruction of property,” the first prong tilted toward release. In fact, the district court judge conceded that “if I was just looking at what the defendant did on January 6th, he would be a free man right now.”
In contrast, the district court found that the second factor, the weight of the evidence, favored detention because the evidence demonstrated that “defendant did what the government says he did on January 6th.”
The decision thus came down to the last two factors: Hale-Cusanelli’s history and the future danger he presented to others.
History and Danger
However, NCIS had interviewed 44 of Hale-Cusanelli’s coworkers, and 34 of them had described him “as having extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities, and women” and stated that he had made abhorrent statements about them such as that “babies born with disabilities should be shot,” that “Hitler should have finished the job,” and that “Jews, women, and blacks were on the bottom of the totem pole.”
NCIS also discovered that, prior to Jan. 6, Hale-Cusanelli had uploaded a series of videos to a YouTube channel in which he expressed racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. Memes conveying similar views were recovered from his phone, as well.
Despite Hale-Cusanelli’s use of such repellent language, however, not one of the 44 people interviewed accused him of ever engaging in violent or threatening behavior.
Because, said the district court, “we don’t typically penalize people for what they say or think,” it turned its focus on a singular youthful indiscretion in which Hale-Cusanelli was involved a decade earlier.
So the guy is a abhorrent Jew Hater .... so now we lock people up for what they think