Larry Nassar's attorney blames judge after disgraced client assaulted in prison
It was always a given that Larry Nassar was going to have a target on his back once he was sent to prison.
After all, in the hierarchy of inmates, the sex offenders and especially the ones who offend against juveniles are considered the lowest of the low.
So it was only a matter of time before one of the other criminals housed in the United States Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, decided it was high time to let Nassar know what he thought of him.
Which is how Nassar’s attorney, Jacqueline McCann, of the State Appellate Defender’s Office in Detroit, came to release a statement that the Detroit News picked up and reported about Nassar’s treatment in prison.
Specifically, it was mere hours after Nassar was released into the general population in May after previously having been held in solitary confinement for his own protection that he was attacked and beaten — not by guards, but by another inmate.
McCann places the blame squarely at the feet of Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who McCann basically accused of running a Stalinist show trial.
“Judge Aquilina made numerous statements throughout the proceedings indicating that she had already decided to impose the maximum allowed by the sentence agreement even before the sentencing hearing began,” McCann wrote in her appeal filing. “Thus, from the defendant’s perspective the sentencing hearing was just a ritual.
“Instead of a proceeding to assist the judge in reaching a fair and just sentencing decision, the judge used the nationally-televised proceeding as an opportunity to advance her own agenda, including to advocate for policy initiatives within the state as well as the federal legislatures, to push for broader cultural change regarding gender equity and sexual discrimination issues and seemingly as a type of group therapy for victims.”
Furthermore, the judge’s allowing over 150 victims to make victim impact statements was seen not as a calling of witnesses in a criminal proceeding to determine Nassar’s guilt, but as a sort of character assassination where Nassar was himself the victim as all those women he was ruled to have molested so long ago got a chance to pile on and run up the score.
McCann also indirectly accused Aquilina of violating Nassar’s Eighth Amendment rights.
“The judge herself openly lamented that she could not impose cruel and unusual punishment upon the defendant, indicated her expectation that he would be harmed in prison, without condemning it, and finally proclaimed, with apparent relish, that she was signing his ‘death warrant,'” McCann wrote.
Putting two and two together and all but outright saying that Aquilina intended prison inmates to do what guards and the judge herself legally could not, McCann added the final stroke.
“Unfortunately, Judge Aquilina’s comments and conducting of the sentencing proceeding appeared to encourage this type of behavior,” McCann wrote.
Ralph Miller, who worked for the Bureau of Prisons that oversees the federal prison system, pointed out that prisoners, not a group exactly notable for having busy, hectic lives, get a chance to watch the news. So they knew what was coming when Nassar was imprisoned among them.
“He was constantly in the news,” Miller said. “He is not going to be able to hide anywhere.”
Furthermore, as Walt Shannon, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3955, the union representing the prison guards, pointed out another fairly obvious point the inmates were able to use to their advantage when Nassar was at his most vulnerable to attack.
“The inmates watch our staffing levels,” Shannon said. “If they’re going to do something … it is going to happen when staffing is low.”
Put another way, if anyone knows the value of motive, means, and opportunity, it’s a convicted criminal.
McCann has gone curiously silent when media outlets have tried to reach her for comment recently.
Perhaps she knows that she shouldn’t damage her client’s case for appeal by speaking out in the media; possibly, she’s staying quiet in hopes of keeping Nassar out of the news so the heat might die down and she can get him moved to another facility where perhaps he will be under lesser threat.
All that is speculation, however.
Nassar is effectively serving a life sentence. He is 54 years old, but not eligible for release until March 23, 2069, when, if he lives, he’ll be over 100.
And he won’t even go free then; his sentences on state convictions in Michigan then kick in, and with those sentences plus his federal totaling out to 175 years.
Miller, meanwhile, came to the prison system’s defense, pointing out that it is not standard operating procedure for prison guards to simply allow troubled inmates to be beaten as a matter of course either by guards or by their peers.
“Part of the mission statement of the Bureau of Prisons is to house inmates in facilities that are safe and this will be a priority, if it is determined that Nassar needs to be transferred,” Miller said.
“If it is determined there is a threat to Nassar’s safety … he will be submitted for a transfer to another facility.”
Likely candidates include the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, or one in Florida, even though neither of those candidate prisons have the dedicated facilities for sex offenders that the one in Arizona — whose inmate population consists mostly of criminals convicted of sex crimes and therefore employs the rehabilitative personnel for the psychology of that particular criminal mind — does.
That is not to say that those other prisons are completely devoid of sex offenders, as Miller pointed out.
“While these two facilities do not offer the Sex Offender Management Program, they are facilities that house a higher number of sex offenders, individuals who have cooperated with the government and individuals who are not active in gang activity,” Miller said.
Michigan State University, Nassar’s onetime employer, has already paid out more than $500 million in damages to more than 300 of Nassar’s victims, and the school is not out of the woods yet.
For one thing, there is still a large civil lawsuit pending against the university.
And for another, the Michigan Attorney General’s office is investigating William Strampel, the dean of osteopathic medicine at MSU, who has already had criminal charges filed against him as evidence surfaces that Nassar was not an isolated case at the university.
What’s more, the NCAA and the Department of Education have questions that need to be answered regarding how Nassar was allowed to operate for so long against so many victims; Congress is even reported to be taking up the torch and engaging in saber-rattling of its own.
But in the meantime, Nassar is learning what it’s like to be such a lowlife that even other lowlifes look down on him.
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