Christmas was days away, omicron cases of coronavirus were surging and the attorneys who had been fighting to protect people in jail were running out of options.
After a nearly two year court fight, Civil Rights Corps lawyers had reached a settlement agreement with officials in Prince George’s County, Md., to help those incarcerated at the jail there. The settlement imposed mandatory testing, isolation and vaccine protocols at a facility where people had complained of conditions so bad they said they didn’t even have enough soap.
But the third-party inspector and other measures designed to make the jail safer was about to go away — as the coronavirus was spreading as never before.
The best the attorneys could do, they decided, was to write a firm letter.
“While the enforcement period for the Settlement Agreement in this case ends today,” the attorneys wrote to county leaders in December 2021, “there is no end in sight to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
This article was written by Katie Mettler and originally published on www.washingtonpost.com