WASHINGTON – The judge was incredulous as a federal prosecutor pushed to keep a 25-year-old man behind bars until his trial on a charge of having a Molotov cocktail at a protest in May.
The judge couldn't understand how the government was arguing that the man — who had never previously been in trouble with the law, wasn't a member of violent groups and lived with his parents in a suburb outside Austin, Texas — was too dangerous to be released.
The prosecutor pressed his case anyway, defending the government’s effort to keep the man locked up even as prisons across the U.S.
were releasing high-risk inmates because of COVID-19 and prosecutors had been told to consider the risks of incarceration during a pandemic when seeking detention.