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Paul Hansmeier, one of the top lawyers behind the controversial law firm Prenda, asked the court for a reduction of his sentence from 14 years in prison. The disqualified attorney says he faced extraordinarily difficult living conditions in prison due to the COVID pandemic. While the measures were well intentioned, they did not prevent the lawyer from becoming infected.
In 2019, a U.S. District Court in Minnesota sentenced Paul Hansmeier to 14 years in prison, followed by two years of supervised release.
Hansmeier was a key player at the Prenda law firm, which started cases against individuals suspected of downloading pirated pornographic videos via BitTorrent.
While suing suspected pirates is not illegal, Prenda Law went much further. Over the years, the firm faced negative court rulings on identity theft, misrepresentation, and even deception.
The Honeypot Pirate
The most controversial were the shocking revelations that the Garment itself produced adult videos and uploaded his own torrents to The Pirate Bay. In doing so, the company created a honeypot for the people they later sued for pirated downloads.
The allegations were serious enough to appear on the radar of US law enforcement agencies that launched a criminal investigation, culminating in prison sentences for the two key players.
Today, Paul Hansmeier and his former colleague John Steele are in prison. While the latter received a reduced sentence for his cooperative stance, Hansmeier was sentenced to 14 years in prison, a verdict he appealed. To make a point, the attorney even rebooted his honeypot scheme from prison.
Lawyer keep fighting
Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal upheld the original ruling after Hansmeier's motion to dismiss the claims was rejected. In addition, the Court also confirmed that the attorney must pay the victims more than $ 1.5 million in restitution.
This was a clear setback for Hansmeier, but it is not the end of their legal battle. Over the past year and a half, he has filed multiple lawsuits involving various (former) law enforcement officials and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
This has reached the point where these federal defendants are clearly fed up with Hansmeier's activities. A few weeks ago, Acting US Attorney for the Minnesota District, Anders Folk, asked the court to restrict Hansmeier's pro se filings, fearing even more lawsuits could be filed.
Hansmeier wants sentence reduction
More recently, the convicted attorney added a new approach to his arsenal. In other pro se motion, Hansmeier asks a Minnesota federal court to reduce his sentence, due to the hardships he endures as a result of restrictive COVID prevention measures.
In April of last year, President Trump declared a national emergency and, as a result, federal prisons, including Sandstone, where Hansmeier resides, took several restrictive measures.
Among other things, the prisoners had no access to the outdoors, sunlight or exercise. They were asked to remain confined 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while family visits and educational programs were also canceled.
According to Hansmeier, these circumstances were much more difficult than the court intended. At the same time, they did very little to limit COVID infections.
“However well-intentioned these measures may have been, these measures subjected the Respondent to conditions that were orders of degrees more severe than this Court could have reasonably anticipated when it weighed the 18 US: C. 3553 factors and the Defendant convicted a prison sentence ”, he writes.
"Furthermore, these harsh conditions, which, again, were intended to protect the prisoners, were, in fact, completely ineffective in protecting the accused against infection."
The lawyer says almost all of the inmates eventually contracted COVID, including himself. Meanwhile, strict preventive measures were in place for many months.
In the application, Hansmeier mentions an inmate who served 38 years in the US Bureau of Prisons, who said that the COVD restrictions resulted in the worst living conditions he had ever experienced.
With this motion, Hansmeier hopes that the court will reduce his sentence. While he is not opposed to an immediate release, a minimum reduction of 14 months should be fair.
Although the defendant would accept the court's grant of immediate release if ordered, at a minimum the defendant is requesting a 14-month reduction in the sentence to account for the 14 months of extraordinarily difficult living conditions to which he has been subjected. during the COVID -19 pandemic. "
This is not the first time that the lawyer has used COVID as an argument to get out of prison. When the coronavirus outbreak started last year, requested a temporary release, for fear that the risk of infection would be greater inside the prison. That request was ultimately denied.
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A copy of Hansmeier's pro se motion to reduce the term of imprisonment is available here (pdf)
