(Headline USA) A lawyer for several inmates charged for criminal activity related to the Jan. 6 Capitol protests said this week that his clients are being “tortured” in D.C. prison and treated like a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people.”
Attorney Joseph McBride told Blaze Media that he is building a case against the federal government over the abuses his clients have suffered, and that he hopes to win them a massive settlement when all is said and done.
“They are gaslighting the entire American public,” McBride said. “They are calling these people extremists and terrorists, but the extremism and the terrorism lies with them!”
Two of his clients, Ryan Taylor Nichols and Christopher Quaglin, are routinely thrown in solitary confinement for long periods of time, and when they try to speak to the public about what is happening inside the prison they are treated even worse, McBride alleged.
Quaglin suffers from Celiac disease, a chronic digestive and immune disorder, and has been declined accommodations or treatment for this condition, according to McBride. As a result, he’s lost 45 pounds since being imprisoned, he added.
“This is a serious underlying condition,” McBride said. “He’s highly allergic to wheat and gluten. When he eats it, he has a severe adverse reaction.
“It’s very bad, he loses weight, he vomits, he has diarrhea, he has intestinal cramps, he breaks out in lesions on his back. It is so bad that he would choose to not eat and starve over the pain of eating these foods.”
Quaglin has also been moved to different facilities six times, and with each move his treatment has grown worse, McBride said.
“Right now, he is locked away in a cell with no windows—no way to reach out to the world simply because his lawyer and his family are speaking out on his behalf. This is a life or death situation,” he said.
Nichols spent the first nine months of his imprisonment in solitary confinement and wasn’t released into a normal prison setting “until we started screaming about it,” McBride said.
Even now, prison officials sporadically put Nichols in solitary confinement “to torture him,” he alleged.
“On April 20, they put him in solitary confinement for reasons that made no sense,” McBride said.
“They left him there for about three weeks. After three weeks, he needed to be put on suicide watch. They had broken him down—he wanted to check out and give up.”
