Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keeper accused of conspiring to invade the United States Capitol, asked to be released from prison pending trial, claiming she was “harshly treated” and is at “special risk in custody” because she is transsexual . She also argues that she is not a threat to the public and only went to the Capitol because “she believed the President of the United States was calling her”.
Watkins, 38, a former army ranger who served in Afghanistan, was “forced to leave military service after her sexual orientation was discovered,” wrote her lawyer in a home detention motion filed late Saturday. In the petition, Watkins claimed that while in a county jail in Ohio, she was stripped naked and left “in a cell with lights on 24 hours a day for 4 days in plain sight”. According to the lawyer, this was a response to a hunger strike that Watkins did in a failed attempt to get medical attention due to an injury to his arm.
Watkins has been detained in at least two facilities since his arrest, including the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio. A spokesman for the county sheriff’s office, which manages the prison, said she could not provide immediate comment. It was unclear on Saturday night where Watkins was currently being held.
Watkins, who runs a bar called Jolly Roger in Woodstock, Ohio, turned herself in and was arrested on January 17. She faces some of the most serious charges stemming from the January 6 uprising.
A grand jury indicted her and eight other members of the extremist group The Oath Keepers for having invaded the Capitol in “an organized and practiced manner” to prevent Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president.
Watkins wore full tactical gear when he joined a line of Oath Keepers that pushed the crowd out of the Capitol, up the stairs and finally into the building. Prosecutors obtained messages and videos in which she seemed elated about what happened that day.
“Yes. We invaded the Capitol today,” she wrote in a message posted on the social app Parler. “Teargassed, the entire 9th. We made our way to the Rotunda. It even reached the Senate. The news is lying (even Fox). about the historical events that we create today. ”
Prosecutors claimed that Watkins was part of an organized group of Oath Keepers and accuse them of conspiring to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
The lawsuits indicate that as early as November 9 – less than a week after the election – Watkins was sending text messages inviting people to his group’s basic training in Ohio, saying to a person, “I need you to fight against opening [sic]. “
But Watkins’ lawyer, federal public defender Michelle Peterson, argues that she poses no threat and should be allowed to return home with a GPS monitoring device until the trial.
According to Peterson, Watkins has no history of violence, no previous convictions and who, although she acknowledges entering the Capitol, “has not vandalized anything … nor has she been involved in any destruction of property and, in fact, has encouraged others not to vandalize”.
The public defender also noted that while on Capitol Hill, Watkins spoke to police, followed his orders and “participated in medical rescue operations for the wounded during the event.” Watkins is a former firefighter and paramedic, working for a local fire department in Fayetteville, NC, for several years.
The suit reports that when Watkins learned that she was wanted for questioning, “she drove almost eight hours to surrender to the local police”.
When she did, according to court documents, the authorities did not even know that she was wanted because her arrest warrant had not yet entered the national system.
In a lawsuit last week arguing that she should stay behind bars, prosecutors argued that Watkins, who in 2019 founded the Ohio State Regular Militia and is a paying member of the Oath Keepers, “was therefore not an auxiliary player who was dragged to the moment, but a key figure that set in motion the violence that oppressed the Capitol. “
Watkins, they added, “formed a subset of the most radical insurgents who plotted and then tried to execute a sophisticated plan to forcibly prevent the results of a presidential election.”
Watkins, for her part, argued that she was induced to go to the Capitol by Trump. “Although wrong,” wrote her lawyer, “she believed she was supporting the Constitution and her government by providing security services at the rally organized by Mr. Trump and the Republican lawmakers who supported her goals.”
Last week, a federal judge denied a request for the release of Thomas Caldwell, a man from Virginia accused of coordinating the attack on the Capitol with Watkins, and charged with her and the others. Caldwell “represents not only a danger to the community, but also to the fabric of democracy,” said Judge Amit Mehta.