We look at the dire conditions inside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants were recently booked. Ten prisoners have now died in the jail’s custody just this year — the latest on Sunday. Shawndre Delmore had been incarcerated pretrial for five months before he was found unresponsive in a cell on August 31. Delmore’s family is demanding answers as to why a previously healthy 24-year-old would so suddenly suffer from cardiac arrest, and is calling for an immediate independent investigation into conditions at the jail, which is already under federal investigation. “This is systemic. This is not a one-off,” says the family’s attorney Mawuli Mel Davis, whose firm represents three other families with relatives that have died at the jail in the past two years. In 2022, Fulton County Jail recorded 15 in-custody deaths, including that of Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old Black man who was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs in his cell. We also speak to Davis about another client, the family of Johnny Hollman Sr., a 62-year-old Black grandfather and church deacon who died after a traffic stop in August, and about the Republican Georgia attorney general’s sweeping indictment of 61 Cop City protesters on RICO charges. “This is fascism,” warns Davis. “This is an attempt to have a chilling effect on people who are organizing against police violence.”

Transcript: democracynow.org

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