A Southern District of New York federal court reluctantly sentenced Tiffany Days to a mandatory minimum of five years in prison as it complained about the "inhuman" conditions she had to endure at federal detention facilities in New York City (article available here).
The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn “are run by morons,” the court stated during the April 29, 2021, hearing. The court castigated the Federal Bureau of Prisons, saying the agency’s ineptitude and failure to “do anything meaningful” at the two facilities amounted to the “single thing in the five years that I was chief judge of this court that made me the craziest.”
The judge told Days, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and possess MDMA and cocaine, that she would have released her — suggesting the torment she faced in pretrial custody was punishment enough — but had to issue a minimum five-year prison sentence by law.
“It is the finding of this court that the conditions to which she was subjected are as disgusting, inhuman as anything I’ve heard about any Colombian prison, but more so because we’re supposed to be better than that,” the court said.