Is Supermax just ‘a fancy prison out there in Colorado’?

· May 18, 2015, 3:40 pm
Photo: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, sketch, sentencing (AP)AP
In this courtroom sketch, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, center, stands with his defense attorneys as a death by lethal injection sentence is read  in the penalty phase of his trial in Boston May 15, 2015.

New York Times’ Mark Binelli told us in April, a lawsuit claims the place is so inhumane that it causes mental illness.

Photo: Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) Supermax prison Florence(Courtesy Federal Bureau of Prisons)
The Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), better known as the Supermax federal prison, in Florence, Colorado.

the New York Times on Sunday caught our eye. In a story about Boston Marathon bomber  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death penalty sentence, and the mixed emotions around the city about it, the Times reporters found “Peggy Fahey, a lifelong Bostonian who was sipping coffee on a park bench in South Boston.”

“Oh, please, let him die. Enough is enough,” said Ms. Fahey, 78, her blue eyes blazing. “Why send him to a fancy prison out there in Colorado and let him be coddled again and let him be interviewed by Diane Sawyer — you know what I mean? Just be done with it.”

Here's some of what Binelli wrote earlier this year about Supermax:

Inmates spend their days in 12-by-7-foot cells with thick concrete walls and double sets of sliding metal doors (with solid exteriors, so prisoners can’t see one another). A single window, about three feet high but only four inches wide, offers a notched glimpse of sky and little else. Each cell has a sink-toilet combo and an automated shower, and prisoners sleep on concrete slabs topped with thin mattresses. 

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