Lawsuit: U.S. Marshals destroyed, abandoned federal detainees’ legal mail

The U.S. Marshals Service is causing “immediate and irreparable harm” by moving federal pretrial detainees to distant Irwin County in violation of their constitutional rights, according to a lawsuit filed by the Northern District of Georgia’s Federal Defender Program.

The complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, alleges the Marshals Service abandoned or destroyed detainees’ legal mail during the process of moving some of them from the Robert A. Deyton Detention Facility in Lovejoy to the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla. Both facilities are privately run.

By abandoning and refusing to take attorney-client mail to Irwin County with the detainees, the Marshals Service violated the Administrative Procedure Act, according to the complaint.

A spokesperson for the Marshals Service declined to comment Wednesday, citing a policy not to comment on pending litigation.

The Federal Defender Program represents defendants who cannot afford to hire a lawyer, including more than half the roughly 400 detainees being moved in phases to Ocilla, about 190 miles from the federal courthouse in Atlanta where their cases are being handled.

Tuesday’s lawsuit marks one of several avenues the defenders have pursued in hopes of stopping the transfer, including filing motions in individual criminal cases. On Saturday, the defender program’s executive director, Natasha Perdew Silas, sent a letter to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens asking him to hold the federal pretrial detainees in the Atlanta City Detention Center, which is less than a mile from the federal courthouse in downtown Atlanta.

U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg of the Northern District told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a statement this week that he made a similar request to Dickens in August.

A spokesperson for Dickens would not say whether the mayor is considering the requests, saying only that his focus is on selling the Atlanta City Detention Center to Fulton County.

In addition to defense attorneys and prosecutors, federal judges in Atlanta oppose the detainees’ relocation. Chief U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May wrote that the move would be a “catastrophe,” in an August letter to a U.S. Department of Justice official.

Tuesday’s lawsuit was filed by attorneys with the Dentons legal practice on behalf of the defender program and its clients. It asks the court to require the Marshals Service to hold the detainees in a “a suitable pretrial detention facility within a specified time period as determined by the court” and to stop destroying or abandoning the detainees’ legal mail.

The complaint alleges the relocation violates the detainees’ Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel by necessitating six hours of round-trip driving for defense attorneys to consult with their clients in person.

According to the lawsuit, the “mass relocation” deprives the detainees of their due process rights and the right to a fair trial under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The transfers preclude the detainees from sufficiently participating in their own defense, in part because of “severe sleep impairment that will result in the revised transportation schedule,” the complaint adds.

Detainees in the Irwin County Detention Center who need to arrive at the courthouse in Atlanta by 8:30 a.m. would need to rise by 3:30 a.m., leave Irwin County by 5 a.m. and return to Irwin at about 9 p.m., the lawsuit says.