The Orange County sheriff and district attorney are fighting a judge's order to release half the jail's inmates over an outbreak of COVID-19, citing community safety.
According to ABC-7, a recent judge's order mandated Sheriff Don Barnes cut his jail population by 50%, something Barnes said he will appeal.
"I have no intention of releasing any of these individuals from my custody," Barnes said. "We are going to file an appeal, and we're going to fight it, and if the judge has any intent of releasing any one of these individuals, he will have to go through line by line, name by name, and tell me which ones he is ordering released."
There were not cases in the county's jails Monday, Dec. 7, according to Barnes, but that jumped to 138 cases Friday, and 416 this past Monday.
Barnes blames the sudden rise on the fact the jail is testing the entire population, including those who are asymptomatic. That, he noted, is not being done in the general public.
He added inmates also are mixing with the general public, where they might be acquiring the virus.
"We have inmates who are participating in different practices – either going to medical appointments or going to court or meeting with their attorneys," he said. "These people are all from the general public, and we know there's a surge within the general public."
District Attorney Todd Spitzer told the station the trend in the jail simply mirrors that of the general population.
"Why does anybody think that what's going on in our jails is not gonna be a mirror image of what's already happening on the outside?" he said. "The numbers in the jail are not out of control or inflated as compared to what's going on outside of our jails."
The sheriff and DA said releasing 1,800 inmates would create more crime and more victims, just as happened when low-level offenders were released early in the pandemic.
"There's no doubt it would jeopardize public safety because these are some of the worst of the worst," Spitzer said.
A spokesperson for the ACLU, which filed a lawsuit on the inmates' behalf, sparking the order, disagreed.
"Public safety does not just mean crime," Jacob Reisberg of the ACLU said. "Public safety also means, is there a hospital bed open if you get sick? And if there's a massive outbreak in the jail, which this de-population order is trying to avoid, there will not be hospital capacity in Orange County for people on the outside who get COVID."
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