Viktor Bout is protesting a planned move by federal prison officials that would send him to the most-heavily guarded penal facility in the U.S. — a Colorado prison known as “Supermax.”
The prison, in mountainous Florence, Colo., is where federal officials have transferred some of the nation’s most dangerous inmates, including national security risks like “shoebomber” Richard Reid, Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, 1993 World Trade Center bombing defendant Ramzi Yousef and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, the prison segregates inmates, monitors them closely with motion detectors and cameras and limits their contacts and access to the outside world.
Bout’s attorneys have protested the planned move to the U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, the federal judge who presided over Bout’s conspiracy case and sentenced him to the minimum 25 year jail term for his conspiracy convictions. Scheindlin has been skeptical about such a move, warning at Bout’s April sentencing that she would not look favorably on a Supermax transfer. Earlier in the trial, she ordered Bout transferred from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in southern Manhattan, where he spent 14 months in solitary confinement, to a more relaxed detention facility in Brooklyn.
[Update] Bout’s attorney, Albert Y. Dayan, now says federal prosecutors and prison officials are rethinking their plans to send Bout to Supermax.
—AP, “Dayan, who represented Bout when he was convicted of conspiracy relating to his support of a Colombian terrorist organization, said he was notified on Tuesday that the Bureau of Prisons was delaying the transfer of Bout from a federal lockup in Brooklyn to another institution. And prosecutors on Tuesday notified the judge in a letter that the Bureau of Prisons was reevaluating where to send Bout, who was sentenced last month to 25 years in prison.”
—NY Post, “Bout, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell weapons to a Colombian terror group targeting Americans, is to move from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to the Florence Federal Correctional Facility in Colorado, his lawyer Andrei Garkusha told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.’
—NY Daily News, “Another notorious lowlife could be bound for the Alcatraz of the Rockies — convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.”