Tuscon, AZ – Convicted child molester and former sports doctor Larry Nassar was attacked by inmates at the federal Arizona prison where he will likely spend the rest of his life after pleading guilty to sexual assault and child pornography charges.
Nassar was “physically attacked” within hours after he was put in the general population at the United States Penitentiary, according to the Detroit News.
The claim was made in court documents filed by Nassar’s attorneys in Ingham County Circuit Court. Nassar’s attorneys want the former Michigan State University doctor to be re-sentenced by a different judge in the first of the molestation cases he faced.
Nassar, 54, is serving a 60-year federal sentence for possessing child pornography and was also sentenced to up to 175 years in state prison for molesting seven girls.
Malaika Ramsey-Heath, who is one of Nassar’s attorneys, said that he was removed from the general population of the prison. She didn’t have details of any injuries Nassar may have sustained, according to the Detroit News.
Ralph Miller, a retired Bureau of Prisons employee with an expertise in sex offender designations, told the Detroit News that federal inmates either live in the general population or the Special Housing Unit.
"That's the jail within the jail: lockdown 23 hours a day and they allow them out one hour a day for recreation," Miller said, according to the Detroit News.
One of Nassar’s attorneys blamed the judge who sentenced the disgraced doctor to prison for the assault, according to the Detroit News.
Attorney Jacqueline McCann said in a court filing that Judge Rosemarie Aquilina’s comments and conduct during the sentencing hearing encouraged violence against Nassar.
The attorney noted that the judge even had the nerve allow more than 150 girls and women to give victim impact statements in court over seven days.
“The judge herself openly lamented that she could not impose cruel and unusual punishment upon the defendant, indicated her expectation that he would be harmed in prison, without condemning it, and finally proclaimed, with apparent relish, that she was signing his 'death warrant,'" McCann wrote, according to the Detroit News. "Unfortunately, Judge Aquilina's comments and conducting of the sentencing proceeding appeared to encourage this type of behavior."
