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alerted the government on August 27, 2020 that there were significant portions of the first three discovery productions that Ms. Maxwell could not read. (Dkt. 66). Despite numerous attempts to fix these problems over the succeeding weeks, including producing a replacement hard drive containing these productions, the problems were not resolved and the replacement hard drive was broken. In addition, the fourth and fifth productions, which were produced after the defense alerted the government to these problems, contained some of the same technical problems and included a significant number of unreadable documents. Most recently, the hard drives for the sixth and seventh productions have stopped functioning properly. As a result, Ms. Maxwell has not had access to a complete set of readable discovery for over four months.13 Ms. Maxwell cannot defend herself if she cannot review the discovery.
Most recently, Ms. Maxwell has had to endure the added burdens of quarantine. On November 18, 2020, Ms. Maxwell was given a COVID test and placed in 14-day quarantine due to contact with a staffer who tested positive. The revolving team of guards assigned to Ms. Maxwell, some coming from other BOP institutions confronting their own COVID outbreaks, heightens her exposure to the virus. As reported by the associate warden to the Criminal Justice Advisory Board on December 2, MDC does not mandate testing among its staff. A temperature check and response to a few questions does little to detect an asymptomatic carrier. The constant strip searching, touch wanding, and in-mouth checking of Ms. Maxwell heightens her risk for exposure to COVID-19.
13 On November 18, 2020, the government, at our request, provided a laptop computer to Ms. Maxwell in the MDC, which it believed would remedy the issues with unreadable documents, and has agreed to provide a new hard drive containing all of the discovery. It is too early to tell whether the new laptop and hard drive will solve all of the technical problems. We note, however, that now that Ms. Maxwell has been released from quarantine, she only has access to the laptop from 8am-5pm, five days a week, which will effectively limit her review time to that time slot because of compatibility issues between the recently produced hard drives and the prison computer.