Tag: hit&run

The U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus has been nothing less than catastrophic, with weak, delayed, and incompetent actions by its two main public health agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Alex Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University and one of the co-founders of the popular blog and online university Marginal Revolution, is an outspoken critic of the government’s actions, including the FDA’s refusal to allow for home testing of the coronavirus. Reason spoke with him about official responses to past pandemics, which countries are doing things right, and how the government can get a better handle on stopping the spread of this novel coronavirus.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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On Tuesday, President Trump warned that keeping the country under lockdown could drive people to recession-induced suicide and that the number of deaths “probably, and I mean, definitely, would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”

To the extent Trump was suggesting that the economic costs of fighting the coronavirus are likely to produce more suicides than there would be deaths from the disease if the U.S. government did nothing, he’s almost certainly wrong. There were about 50,000 suicides in the U.S. last year. Even if this number increased dramatically, it would be very difficult to match the estimated deaths of COVID-19, which are in the hundreds of thousands or even millions under worst-case, do-nothing projections. If aggressive countermeasures to limit the coronavirus’ reduce the COVID-19 death toll to a bad flu season—the outcome many are hoping for—you would still have a problem at least as serious as the national suicide rate.

But while Trump likely exaggerated the trade-off here, the Associated Press—which published a fact-check of the president’s remarks—went too far in the opposite direction: significantly understating the possibility that suicides would increase if prolonged social-distancing measures lead to a sustained economic downturn.

“There’s no evidence that suicides will rise dramatically if nationwide social-distancing guidelines that have closed many businesses and are expected to trigger a spike in unemployment stay in place,” wrote the AP, prefacing this remark with a “THE FACTS” heading.

This is technically true in that we have not been able to run this exact experiment in some sort of laboratory. But suicides do tend to rise during periods of economic turmoil. During the first year of the Great Depression, the U.S. suicide rate surged from about 14 per 100,000 people to 18 per 100,000. In 1932—the last full year of the depression—the suicide rate reached its all-time high of 22 per 100,000.

The AP is aware of this fact, but bizarrely waves it away with this line: “The even higher suicide rate seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s fell sharply with the onset of World War II.” That an even larger crisis saw declining suicide rates a full decade later is cold comfort. The AP cites an expert who claims that “war and natural disaster” cause society to pull together and thus drive the suicide rate down, but a man-made crisis caused by deliberate government action to shut down the economy is neither a war nor a natural disaster.

Another fact-check of Trump’s remarks on suicide, published by ABC News, was much more responsible with its claims:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide mortalities have gone up every year since 1999, but it’s still “selective” for the president to latch onto that, says Richard Dunn, associate professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of Connecticut who has studied the connection between markets and depression.

“The general fact that President Trump cited is, in fact, true that when economies contract suicides do go up,” Dunn said, acknowledging how the financial crisis of the early 2000s triggered more suicides, “but that is not the only cause of death that responds to economic downturn.”

“If you were to look across all the current causes of death in a recession, you would see that the number of deaths actually declines. Heart deaths from heart disease fall. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents crashes fall,” Dunn added. “One of the few activities that we have left to us in many parts of the country is to go out for a walk, so physical activity tends to go up.”

“So we actually see overall that there are fewer deaths in economic downturn—but suicide is the one major cause of death that does not follow that pattern,” Dunn said.

It’s one thing to say that Trump exaggerated the likely impact on the suicide rate. It’s quite another to say the impact is something we would have no reason to consider at all.

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Four different diagnostics companies were planning to ship at-home tests for the coronavirus infections to their customers this week, but are instead “pausing” their roll-outs in order to avoid the displeasure of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bureaucrats. In fact, companies are destroying samples sent back from customers rather than testing them to comply with FDA guidance.

The companies had launched their tests based on their interpretation of the latest FDA Emergency Use Authorization, (EUA) which says that any lab that had been certified under the appropriate quality-control standards could start performing coronavirus tests. They were all using just such labs.

For example, to comply with the FDA’s testing guidance TechCrunch reports that the California-based Carbon Health sent out a notice to their coronavirus at-home test customers stating that “we sincerely regret to inform you that you will not get a test result. If you have already shipped your kit back, the specimen will be destroyed by Curative, Inc [their lab testing partner] using standard biohazard disposal. If you have not received your kit yet, please discard it upon receipt.”

Austin-based Everlywell was ramping up to handle 250,000 of its at-home coronavirus tests per week. Since the FDA’s EUA does not now stop private labs from developing and deploying coronavirus tests for clinical use, the company has pivoted to making its initial supply of COVID-19 tests available to hospital and health care providers, as a way to get around the FDA’s regulatory roadblock. Carbon Health is offering their coronavirus testing at its walk-in clinics.

The fact that self-administering these tests is uncomfortable may make their results less accurate, but the fact that the FDA allows their use by health care providers indicates that these tests work and are in no way fraudulent. The FDA needs to get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing now.

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Yesterday, I blogged that professors quietly support my views on pass/fail grading. Since then, I have received several emails from students. They note there is quiet support for my view, but many students are afraid of being shamed by classmates on social media. I post here two such messages, with slight edits.

First:

Professor Blackman,

Thank you for sharing your platform with us. You have no idea how validating it is to know that professors also share the same views on the pass/fail grading system. I have taken the brunt of the attacks on social media. I have to admit that I am concerned about my reputation among my peers, but it is what it is. Here are my thoughts:

Like professors, the main method of attack on students who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system is a lack of compassion for others. Any reasoning given to support our stance is drowned out by the droves of students claiming we are “gunners who want to screw the rest” and we should be worried about our community, not our GPA.

Based on the comments on social media that I’ve seen, what I can tell you about students like me who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system – we are not gunners. The majority of students advocating against pass/fail are those who have suffered extreme personal tragedies during their law school career that negatively affected their grades. Arguably, we are students who have the most empathy for others. Because we know first-hand the challenges a law student will face should they or a family member contract COVID-19. Maybe the issue is that our perspective on problems is irreversibly skewed after what we’ve been through. Maybe the other law students simply cannot understand us because they are fortunate to never have experienced the things that we have. Things like taking care of someone with cancer, the death of a loved one, or Hurricane Harvey destroying their car and home.

Other students against the mandatory pass/fail system are those who are in their last semester of law school and this is their last chance to achieve the GPA they need to secure the job they are applying for. Students who need scholarships to continue their education. Students who are early in their law school career and are facing being kicked out if they don’t up their GPA.

The major problem lurking beneath all this is that future attorneys, lawmakers, and judges are reinforcing the culture of hating anyone who disagrees with them and refusing to listen to the other’s perspective. Hate is spread. Rumors are created. People are silenced. That’s a problem that I am worried about.

Second:

It seems Professors are dealing with the same situation as law students. Currently, students across the nation are utilizing different avenues of social media to brutally wield their opinion as a weapon against all in opposition essentially silencing all that disagree. The opinion—mandatory pass or fail. There are many law students sitting quietly in opposition waiting for someone to be that voice.

Many of the things you have posted are silently supported by law students. However, I can only speak for myself. As a law student, I rely on my graded performance on exams to help gauge my weaknesses and strengths. With that information, I’m able to form a more suitable study approach to the Bar Exam. Without that feedback, I would not be able to identify where I need the most work.

I would consider myself affected by COVID-19. In fact, the other day, my significant other and I made a list prioritizing which bills to pay first in the event either of us lose our job. My new day consists of working from home, home schooling two small children and studying for and attending law school classes virtually. Fortunately, my significant other has a job but the future of it, is uncertain. With these financial and health concerns coupled with the limited time to devote to my studies, I fear I may under perform on exams. However, I have learned from multiple professors and mentors along the way that nothing worthwhile comes easy. I enrolled in law school as a young parent knowing I would face different obstacles than most. I welcomed the challenge at the time and stand ready for this challenge now.

If the Law School I currently attend switches to Pass/Fail (no decision has been made as of yet) it will take away my opportunity to rise to the challenge and learn a very important lesson. Wanting to refrain from a mandatory pass/fail is not wholly about boosting my GPA or maintaining my GPA (as most vying for pass/fail believe is the reason why students oppose). More importantly, it’s about learning how to juggle the curve balls life can through because as an attorney, I won’t be able to press pause or step away when it gets tough. This is a lesson most people, not just law students, need to learn. Law Schools taking this opportunity away are doing a disservice to their students.

The National Law Journal published a story on this issue. The University of Chicago has (at least so far) agreed to stick with the usual grading curve. Many students are unhappy. But some students were willing to sign a counter-petition.

A much smaller group of Chicago law students signed a counterpetition in favor of maintaining some form of the traditional grading system, citing a desire to have letter grades for 2L summer employment purposes and to ensure high-quality class participation.

“Many students chose to attend the law school due to the balance struck between collaboration and incentives for personal academic growth,” the counterpetition reads. “We worry a mandatory pass/fail grading system would disrupt that balance by reducing class participation and lowering the quality of discussion.”

I suspect more students agree, but are unwilling to publicly put their names on the petition.

Peer pressure to conform exists at all levels: for students and for faculty. Thankfully, peer pressure never worked on me, even as a kid. I will always voice my views candidly.

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The lights are going out all over Europe, the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the world. Borders are closing, cities are shutting down, and governments are imposing export bans. It looks like one of the first victims of the new coronavirus is globalization. 

The World Bank has estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the economic damage from epidemics usually comes from aversion behavior, not from disease, deaths, and the associated loss of production. This time, due to the massive scale of the shutdowns, that cost is going to be much bigger.

Perhaps not in Sweden, though. It’s hard to predict even the next few hours or days, but it is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

With beautiful exaggeration, Bloomberg News reported that “Swedes Try Laissez-Faire Model in Controversial Virus Response.” Sweden did not do this out of libertarian zeal, but because of a tradition of listening to experts and health authorities, who thought it better to track individual cases within the country than to shut everything down. When everybody is awaiting the latest epidemiological data to make decisions, there is less room for political grandstanding and strongman rhetoric. 

There is also a case to be made that the culture of personal responsibility and interpersonal trust makes it easier for the Swedish government to leave the ultimate decisions to the people. When the public health agency recommends working from home and avoiding unnecessary gatherings, most Swedes abide by it, even without putting police on the streets and imposing stiff penalties. That leaves necessary room for local knowledge and personal needs. Individuals, organizations, and businesses can go ahead anyway, if their particular situation makes it especially important that they remain open or move around freely. 

And by the way, it might help that Sweden is a country of introverts, famous for distant relations between generations. Swedes did social distancing before it was cool.

There are reasons to fear that this near-consensus toward cordoning off whole nations will strengthen an already ongoing global reactionary impulse against the movement of people and goods across borders. If we can’t find our way back to an open world after this, our reaction to COVID-19 will hurt us even more than the virus. After decades of unprecedented progress at combating poverty, hunger, and disease, these trends would be reversed, and we would be even less well prepared for the next nasty surprise nature throws at us. 

Despite the popular perception, our best hope against pandemic is continued trade and cooperation across borders. Travel bans are mostly “political placebo” as U.K. health researcher Clare Wenham puts it, and the World Health Organization is advising against it, for the simple reason that COVID-19 is already everywhere, but vital supplies and medical equipment are not. 

In fact, one reason why Italy has suffered terribly seems to be that closed borders gave them a false sense of security and made them underestimate the spread already going on within the country.

It is easy to see the political logic behind bans on the export of essential equipment, implemented by countries like Germany and France at an early stage. You have to serve your own population first, right? But it’s the same logic as toilet paper hoarding, and it has the same result. It forces others to do the same, which means that it is not on the market when you really have to go.

During the global food price crisis of 2010–11, many governments banned food exports to secure local supplies. But afterward, we found out that those bans were part of the problem. In fact, they accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and almost a quarter of the increase in the price of corn.

So even though the world often moves in a nationalist direction during crises, it is exactly the time when we have the most urgent need for international agreements to forego beggar-thy-neighbor policies. 

Wealth, communications technology, and open science have made our response to new diseases faster than ever. In a poorer and more closed world, without mass transportation, microorganisms traveled slower but they traveled freely, recurring for hundreds of years, until they had picked almost all of us off, one by one. Today our response is also global, and therefore for the first time, mankind has a fighting chance. 

Hospitals, researchers, health authorities, and drug companies everywhere can now supply each other with instant information. They can coordinate efforts to analyze and combat the problem. By organizing clinical trials of therapeutics in many countries simultaneously, they can reach a critical mass of patients they would never have found at home.   

The pace of the response has been extraordinary. After having tried to conceal the outbreak for weeks, China announced that it had found a new coronavirus on January 2. Using technologies developed on the other side of the globe, Chinese scientists could read the complete genome of the virus and publish it on a new global hub for medical research in just a week. This information enabled researchers in Berlin to develop a test to detect infections in just six days. This is what we now use to track infected people around the world—except in the U.S., where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on keeping it out and developing a domestic, faulty test, which set back American efforts several weeks.

When someone reveals the mechanism of the virus, researchers and algorithms everywhere can get to work on ways of attacking its weak spots. On March 25, not even three months after China admitted a new virus was on the loose, America’s National Library of Medicine lists 143 potential drugs and vaccines against the virus, already recruiting (or preparing to recruit) patients to participate in clinical trials.

Those companies are, just like our health care systems, disproportionally reliant on immigrant workers. According to the immigration advocacy nonprofit Partnership for a New American Economy, eight out of 10 medical patents from leading U.S. universities are invented by someone born outside of the country. In other words, immigration bans kill Americans.

That is not all. Globalization might even prevent many pandemics from happening. A 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Tel Aviv showed that frequent travel between populations makes us catch a lot of bugs, but also increases immunity against new strains. So apocalyptic outbreaks become less likely. This is the reason why previously isolated populations are most at risk—from Native Americans after 1492 to the swine flu in 2009, when 24 of the 30 worst affected countries were island nations.

Human mobility is like a “natural vaccination” says Oxford’s Robin Thompson. The researchers speculate that this might help explain the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the Spanish flu in the last 100 years. 

That doesn’t help at all when a virus that previously only affected animals mutates and jumps to humans, like the new coronavirus. Then we have no resistance and it can spread quickly.

But if the researchers are correct, the jet engine has saved millions of lives from pandemics only in the last few decades. And as even Sweden’s governing Social Democrats emphasize right now, the greatest threat to our economy, our jobs, and our health is that the planes stop flying and the trucks get stuck at the border.

That is also worth taking into account before we turn off the last lights.

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In the past few weeks, I have had to cancel many plane tickets, hotel bookings, rental car reservations, and other travel plans. Fortunately, all cancellation and change fees were waived. But the airlines, at least, do not offer refunds. They simply give you credits for future trips. At present, I have given United a ~$5,000 interest-free line of credit. You’re welcome.

Frequent fliers have also begun to worry about a related issue: status. As a general matter, airlines award status based on miles flow and hotels award status based on nights stayed. Now, airplanes are grounded and hotels are vacant. Business travel has ground to a halt. What will happen to status for 2021?

Hilton released an announcement that should put frequent fliers at some ease:

We consider it our privilege to have you as a Hilton Honors member and we want to show our appreciation by extending your benefits:

• 2019 Status Extension. All members whose 2019 status was scheduled to be downgraded on March 31, 2020—whether it’s Diamond, Gold or Silver—will automatically receive an extension through March 31, 2021.
• 2020 Status Extension. We are extending your 2020 member status through March 31, 2022. This means you will continue to enjoy all the Diamond, Gold or Silver benefits you have access to today for the next 24 months.
• Points Extension. We will pause the expiration of all Points scheduled to expire between now and December 31, 2020.
• Weekend Night Rewards Earned on Eligible Hilton Credit Cards. We have extended the expiration date of all unexpired Weekend Night Rewards as of March 11, 2020, and all new ones issued until August 30, 2020, through the end of next summer (August 31, 2021).

The second bullet is the most important. Whatever status members currently have in 2020, they will retain in 2021 (to be precise, through March 2022).

I hope United and other travel companies follow suit: simply extend current status for another year.

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Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Tuesday that her office had charged Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith and three other county officials with a “litany” of felony crimes for embezzling and misusing funds seized through asset forfeiture.

Smith is charged with 10 criminal counts, including embezzling, official misconduct, evidence tampering, conspiracy to commit forgery, and conducting a criminal enterprise.

The charges follow a year-long investigation that was launched after a successful public records lawsuit revealed more than $100,000 in questionable expenditures from Macomb County’s asset forfeiture fund. Authorities now estimate the Smith and other officials embezzled roughly $600,000 since 2012.

According to the attorney general’s office, the investigation “found that Smith and other defendants used the money to buy flowers and make-up for select secretaries, a security system for Smith’s residence, garden benches for staffers’ homes, country club catering for parties, campaign expenditures and more.”

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors can seize property—cash, cars, and even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking. 

Law enforcement groups say asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt organized crime. However, civil liberties groups say there are too few procedural protections for innocent property owners, who bear the burden of challenging seizures in court, and too many perverse profit incentives for law enforcement.

If found guilty, Smith would be far from the first public official to be caught with his hand in an asset forfeiture cookie jar. Last year, a local Pennsylvania newspaper reported that the Lancaster County district attorney used forfeiture funds to lease a Toyota Highlander SUV.

In Illinois, former La Salle County State’s Attorney Brian Towne faced criminal charges for misconduct and misappropriating public funds after he allegedly spent asset forfeiture funds on an SUV, WiFi for his home, and local youth sports programs. Town created his own highway interdiction unit and asset forfeiture fund for his office, a move the Illinois Supreme Court later ruled was illegal. The case against Towne was dismissed last year after a judge ruled his right to a speedy trial had been violated.

In 2017, Philadelphia Weekly, in collaboration with City & State PA, reported that the local D.A.’s office had spent $7 million in asset forfeiture funds over the last five years, including “at least one contract that appears to have violated city ethics guidelines—construction work awarded to a company linked to one of the DA’s own staff detectives.”

A 2016 Department of Justice Inspector General audit found that an Illinois police department spent more than $20,000 in equitable sharing funds on accessories for two lightly used motorcycles, including after-market exhaust pipes, decorative chrome, and heated handgrips.

Or there was the time a Georgia sheriff purchased a $90,000 Dodge Viper with forfeiture funds for the department’s DARE program. Or there was a different Georgia sheriff who bought a $70,000 Dodge Charger Hellcat (707 horsepower and tinted windows, quite naturally) with forfeiture funds.

“In order for citizens to maintain trust in the institutions of government, public officials must, at all times, conduct themselves in accordance with the laws of our state,” Nessel said in a press release. “When public officials fail to do so, the people must have confidence that they will be held to account, fairly, and without any special treatment based upon their status as a public official.”

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It’s a sign of the times that when #cancelrent started trending on Twitter, the main accounts spreading it did not belong to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (for the most part), but rather to New York state legislators who’re proposing yet another once-unthinkable policy intervention to assist people affected by coronavirus-induced business closures and layoffs.

“Tenants can’t pay rent if they can’t earn a living,” said State Sen. Mike Gianaris (D/WF–Queens) last Friday. “Let’s #CancelRent for 90 days to keep people in their homes during the #coronavirus crisis.”

Tenants can’t pay rent if they can’t earn a living.

Let’s #CancelRent for 90 days to keep people in their homes during the #coronavirus crisis https://t.co/jaiab720YY

— Sen. Mike Gianaris (@SenGianaris) March 20, 2020

That same day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) issued a 90-day eviction moratorium for both residential and commercial tenants statewide. Similar moratoriums have been issued by local and state governments across the country as one way of keeping people in their homes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Federal agencies have also acted. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced last week that it will suspend foreclosures for 60 days for all single-family homeowners with a Federal Housing Administration-backed (FHA) loan. FHA loans make up 12 percent of the mortgage market by dollar volume.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said that it will offer mortgage forbearance through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for owners of multifamily housing who agree to suspend evictions.

Gianaris, tenant activists, and other like-minded legislators say these moves don’t go far enough.

While an eviction moratorium will keep people in their homes temporarily, they say, it will do nothing to relieve tenants of their obligation to pay rent. They argue this sets us up a housing crisis a few months from now when the moratorium expires and tenants without the ability to pay months of back-rent are evicted en masse.

This is false.

Postponing evictions while allowing rent obligations to continue to accumulate only creates a bigger housing crisis in 3 months https://t.co/fTA3ZzxwVB

— Sen. Mike Gianaris (@SenGianaris) March 22, 2020

To prevent that, Gianaris introduced legislation Monday that would waive tenants’ obligation to pay rent for 90 days if they’ve lost income as a result of the state’s forced shutdown of non-essential businesses. Landlords would be able to deduct the rental income they lose as a result of this rent freeze from their mortgage payments.

The latter provision is a lifeline to building owners who argue that they too have bills that don’t go away just because a tenant is out of work.

Suspending both rent and mortgage payments, however, just shifts these costs further down the line to banks and financial institutions who lent to landlords. If the return on their real estate investments goes to zero, lenders could also be in trouble.

Shifting costs from one interest group to another doesn’t eliminate costs, it just changes who ends up bearing them. The rent freeze being proposed is a risky game of hot potato.

There’s obviously a public health rationale for keeping people in their homes right now, particularly in New York City, which is experiencing the most severe COVID-19 outbreak in the country. There’s also a sound case that the government should compensate people it puts out of work.

The best way to do that, however, would be through federal income assistance that allows everyone to continue to pay their bills. Cash assistance has the added benefit of transparency, as the costs of these closures will be on budget for everyone to see. Eviction moratoriums and rent cancelations, however, are more opaque, overly complex, and could create problems down the road.

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This request comes from my wife’s high school classmate Dr. Rachel Sussman, who is affiliated with the Stanford Health Care. She has explained the idea far better than I could. So I am (with permission) reprinting her Facebook post on the subject:

My public community hospital (VMC-O’Connor in San Jose, CA) needs help. I am on day three of working in our inpatient COVID ward. Yes, we need PPE. However, we also have an urgent tech need that could indirectly help a great deal with our PPE needs. We need about 50 iPads or similar devices to be placed in every COVID patient room and every ER room. This would allow doctors and nurses to communicate with and evaluate patients without going into the room and using a set of PPE every time. Perhaps more importantly, one of the ghastly things I’ve already seen with this disease is that patients who are dying are dying alone. Family cannot visit. We have tried to use smart phones as a stopgap measure, but in our hospital most of our patients are too sick, too old, not English-speaking, or too poor (they don’t have a smart phone) for this to be practical. If any friends have contacts at a big tech company that could provide this type of device as a emergency charitable donation, it would make a big difference in the lives of doctors, nurses, RTs, and patients in the weeks and months to come. Photo of my n95 marks post-COVID shift.

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While states and counties around the country are trying to keep inmates out of dirty jails and prisons to avoid COVID-19 outbreaks, federal authorities in Maryland are fighting emergency petitions from federal inmates who want to be transferred into home confinement in order to avoid infection. 

A Maryland defense attorney says the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is refusing to release one of his clients into home confinement earlier than scheduled, despite a judge’s order to do so. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Maryland filed a motion in a separate case today opposing an inmate’s petition to be transferred from a halfway house to home confinement.

Last Friday, a U.S. District Judge ordered Erica Cook, a federal inmate currently residing at a halfway house in Baltimore, to be released into home confinement following an emergency motion for her immediate transfer. Cook was scheduled to be released into home confinement on April 22. 

However, Cook’s attorney, Brian Stekloff, says the BOP hasn’t budged to move Cook since the judge’s order last week.

“The Department of Justice—specifically the Bureau of Prisons—has a constitutional and statutory obligation to ensure the safety of inmates under its supervision, and its refusal to meet those obligations and to abide by a court order violates my client’s constitutional rights and common decency in this difficult and challenging time,” Stekloff says. “It is unconscionable that the government is spending time and taxpayer money to continue a needless crusade to jeopardize the health of our client and others in the halfway house.”

Halfway houses are crowded communal spaces, and many of them are filthy and in poor state of repair.

“Residents in halfway houses typically live in close quarters with many other people, just like in nursing homes and prisons,” Cook’s emergency motion argued. “Residents in halfway houses eat, socialize, and participate in programming in common areas, just like in nursing homes and prisons. Similarly, workers and residents frequently come and go from halfway houses, potentially carrying with them any diseases or viruses to which they were exposed.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland is opposing an emergency motion by an inmate to be released into home confinement in a similar case.

In a motion filed today in a separate case where an inmate is petitioning for emergency release, federal prosecutors argue the judge does not have the authority to modify the final terms of a sentence, and that the inmate is scheduled to be released to home confinement within the week anyway.

“Nothing in federal law permits the Court to alter a final sentence once it has been imposed. In fact, federal law bars such a move, particularly here where BOP is vested with full discretion to designate where inmates serve their sentence,” federal prosecutors argue. “For these reasons, the motion should be denied.”

Federal prosecutors also argued the inmate is scheduled to be released into home confinement later this week anyway.

Reason reported yesterday that a bipartisan group of 14 senators and numerous criminal justice advocacy organizations across the political spectrum urged the Trump administration to use compassionate release, the president’s clemency powers, and other tools to get elderly and at-risk inmates out of federal prisons as soon as possible to avoid potentially catastrophic coronavirus outbreaks.

“This is crazy,” says Kevin Ring, president of the criminal justice advocacy group FAMM. “Anyone who’s remotely ready to be sent home should be sent home. The people who are already at the halfway house are only weeks or months from getting out anyway.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, the Justice Department, and the Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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