Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown is asking a judge to free her from a Central Florida prison to avoid her being infected with the coronavirus.
“So long as Brown remains in custody, her capacity to protect herself from a serious, or even fatal, infection will be compromised,” attorney William Mallory Kent argued Wednesday in a motion asking U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan to change her sentence to time served.
Brown, a Democrat who represented Jacksonville in Congress for 24 years, had been scheduled to remain in custody until May 2022, at a minimum-security prison camp at the Coleman Federal Correctional Institution in Sumter County.
She’s serving a five-year sentence for a string of fraud convictions tied to a sham charity, One Door for Education, to which she asked supporters to make donations.
Kent asked the judge for “compassionate release” of his 73-year-old client, citing a 2018 law that lets a judge consider requests like this once an inmate has exhausted appeals for release within the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Brown requested release through her camp warden’s office on Feb. 26 and received a form letter denying that request on Monday, Kent wrote.
He wrote that Brown’s health has generally declined in prison and that her future was at a “crisis stage” because she and other inmates in her camp’s unit were about to be moved to create room for two infected inmates being transferred from a local jail.
“Brown is being moved into a double-bunk setting with another inmate who is coughing,” Kent wrote. “Something must be done urgently if Brown’s life is to be protected.”