Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast
A viral video from March featuring Arizona Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake on Australia’s 60 Minutes has been making the rounds again this week. In it, Lake dodges questions about Donald Trump possibly pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters, responding with this: “What I don’t like is that people are being held in prison without being charged. That’s un-American.”
Lake, according to the Associated Press, got one big thing wrong: the Jan. 6 defendants have been charged. Still, Lake raises a valid point about criminal justice that, under normal conditions, a Republican might not typically raise—which is that an absurd number of people are locked up in this country for inhumane lengths of time before they’re afforded a “speedy trial.”
For example, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Georgia, almost half of the people held at Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail haven’t even been formally charged with a crime.