Attorneys for Sean “Diddy” Combs say they’ll proceed to battle to have their shopper launched from the infamous Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, the place different high-profile defendants have additionally been held.
“I cannot enable him to remain in jail in the future longer than crucial,” protection legal professional Marc Agnifilo mentioned outdoors a New York federal courtroom on Wednesday.
His workforce needed Combs positioned underneath home arrest on $50 million bail, however their request was denied.
U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter mentioned Wednesday {that a} bail bundle that may have stored the hip-hop mogul underneath home arrest at his Star Island mansion in Miami, with safety and no entry to cellphones, the Internet or ladies aside from his household, was not sufficient to launch him pending trial.
The facility, which has housed inmates together with R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein’s affiliate Ghislaine Maxwell, has a historical past of violence and squalid conditions.
In a letter to the courtroom, Combs’ legal professionals argued that evaluating him to Kelly and Maxwell, each of whom are being held in Brooklyn federal jail awaiting trial on intercourse trafficking costs, was incorrect.
“Sean Combs has by no means evaded, averted, dodged or run away from a problem in his life. He is not going to begin now,” Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, Combs’ attorneys, mentioned in a letter to Carter on Wednesday.
Attorneys mentioned there are massive variations between Combs’ case and others as a result of Combs will not be charged with youngster intercourse trafficking.
Since March, he has even stored prosecutors knowledgeable of all his home flights, and on September 5, he moved right into a Manhattan resort, understanding he would seemingly be indicted.
Citing previous murders and suicides on the facility, Combs’ attorneys argued he shouldn’t have been held there.
The courts “have acknowledged that the circumstances on the Metropolitan Detention Facility in Brooklyn should not acceptable for pretrial detention,” Combs’ attorneys argued in courtroom paperwork.
In an August ruling, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown mentioned federal detention allegations involving “insufficient supervision, wanton assaults, and lack of enough medical care are supported by a rising physique of proof, with some instances being irrefutable.” He continued, “Each of the 5 months previous this opinion has been marred by situations of catastrophic violence at MDC, together with two obvious murders, two grotesque stabbings, and an assault so extreme that the sufferer’s eye socket was fractured.”
The detention heart homes roughly 1,800 inmates.
Prosecutors have mentioned the MDC has been the positioning of sexual assaults by guards on feminine inmates, in response to the Associated Press. A federal decide in 2016 was reluctant to ship a lady there, citing a report that mentioned there was “an absence of fresh, recent air, an entire absence of daylight, and an absence of ANY out of doors climate or exercise.”
Combs has been on the heart of a broad federal investigation since not less than the start of the yr and was arrested in New York on Monday.
On Tuesday, prosecutors unsealed the indictment towards Combs, charging him with intercourse trafficking, conspiracy and transportation for prostitution. He pleaded not responsible and was denied bail at that listening to as nicely.
The indictment alleges that Combs and his associates lured feminine victims, typically underneath the guise of a romantic relationship. Combs then allegedly used power, threats of power, coercion and managed substances to persuade them to have interaction in sexual acts with male prostitutes in what Combs referred to as “freak offs.” Combs is accused of giving the ladies ketamine, ecstasy and GHB to “maintain them obedient and compliant” through the performances.
The encounters, which prosecutors mentioned typically lasted for days, had been elaborate productions that Combs organized, directed, masturbated throughout and infrequently recorded, in response to the indictment. Prosecutors allege in a detention memo filed in courtroom that the sexual performances occurred commonly from not less than 2009 by this yr and that the resort rooms the place they had been carried out typically suffered important harm.
