Donovan Davis Jr. is a prisoner at the FCI Coleman satellite federal prison camp and is expected to be released from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on December 3, 2028. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison after being found guilty by a jury on May 14, 2015, on one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, one count of wire fraud, six counts of wire fraud and eight counts of money laundering. Davis has vigorously contested the government’s case against him.
Since entering prison, Davis has been productive with his time and earned the respect of staff. Davis has unique experience as a heavy equipment mechanic and heavy equipment operator. He works approximately 40 hours per week in Coleman’s facilities department. According to a progress report, submitted by his case manager, Juan Coriano, and unit manager, Paula Floyd, Davis does everything from repairing forklifts at the UNICOR factory and zero-turn lawnmowers at institutions until cutting down hundreds of trees and clearing the surface surrounding the camp. , low and medium security prisons as well as the penitentiary.
Davis, who has special permission from Coleman’s facilities manager who is allowed to have three Caterpillar backhoe and loader manuals so he can keep up with the operations and management of the heavy equipment used around the prison complex, one of the largest in the BOP. Davis is credited with saving the BOP nearly $1 million by providing services that include land clearing, training site construction, truck repair and heavy equipment. All in all, he has made productive use of his time in prison but he has also helped the BOP as there are no private sector heavy equipment operators willing to work for less than a dollar an hour.
During the pandemic, Davis, an African American with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, obesity and sleep apnea, worried that he was at risk for an adverse reaction to COVID-19. In April 2022, then-Attorney General William Barr ordered the BOP to move minimum- and low-security inmates with underlying health conditions to home confinement both for the safety of the inmate and to reduce the prison population. The program was a success and nearly 50,000 inmates were transferred to home confinement and many of them completed their sentences at home without incident. The program was one of the most successful in BOP history and demonstrated that many minimum security inmates could be housed safely outside of institutions. The CARES Act’s stay-at-home order ended in April 2023 with President Joe Biden declaring the pandemic over.
The BOP relied on prison medical directors to determine whether or not someone was eligible for the CARES Act on health grounds, then the person had to have the support of both the case manager, who oversees the inmate’s life daily, like the director. . As of November 2021, Davis had not yet served 50% of his sentence, a requirement the BOP added through a series of iterations to determine a criteria for home confinement, but he was very close to 46 %. Davis was also listed by the BOP as the least likely to reoffend and the lowest risk of violence, a strict criteria used by the BOP to measure risk.
Failing to meet the time served requirements, Davis’ case was sent to the BOP’s Central Office in Washington, DC, which reviewed the file and also, as part of its protocol, placed contact the US Attorney’s office to let them know. that Davis was being considered for home confinement. The head office denied Davis’ request and has been trying to figure out how this happened ever since. Earlier this year, Davis’ attorney, Brian Horwitz, contacted Assistant U.S. Attorney Roberta Bodnar to ask if anyone in her office opposed home confinement of Davis, to which Bodnar responded in an email to Horwitz: “The BOP’s placement decisions are entirely up to the BOP. I am not involved in that process.”
Davis’ wife, Christie Davis, believes her husband is incarcerated for the asset he has become to the agency through his work and expertise in heavy equipment. Christie told me: “Donovan loves the job Coleman does because it gets him out and it’s an interesting job for him, but I’m afraid it made him indispensable in prison and it may have made it hard for him to come home.”
“The only thing that makes sense is that he was denied because he’s saving them millions,” Christie said, “plus he’s a man of color.”
In August 2022, Davis met the 50% service time requirement set by the BOP and was once again denied by the Central Office, which was also reviewing all previous CARES Act cases. According to a BOP source, “Davis was denied because of ‘public safety issues,'” says Horwitz, “which makes no sense. Davis has a community security level and is housed in an unfenced camp. He is not a risk for no one. He is given the keys to the facility’s vehicles and is allowed to tour the 1,600+ acre complex.”
“Mr. Davis was convicted of a non-violent white-collar crime,” Horwitz says, “and his two co-defendants, who were more culpable than Mr. Davis in the fraud, have already been released from BOP custody.” It should be noted that those co-accused, who cooperated and did not go to trial, received significantly lesser sentences.
Christie claims that race must have played a role. Although there are no publicly available statistics on those granted CARES Act home confinement based on race, Christie believes there is something wrong with the way her husband’s case was handled. “Other inmates who were involved in bigger schemes or drug cases are in the house,” Christie said, “but they were as white as I was and I can’t think that played a role in Donovan’s case. Christie is Caucasian.
The BOP provided information on who was released under the CARES Act and indicated that of the 13,204 inmates transferred to home confinement under the CARES Act from March 26, 2020 to May 27, 2023, 8,779 (66%) were whites, 3,900 (29.5%). were black, 399 (3%) were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 126 (less than 1%) were American Indian. [Note: According to the BOP, the population breakdown of inmates in custody as of November 11, 2023 is as follows: White – 57%, Black – 38.6%, Asian – 1.4% and Native American – 2.7%].
“The real issue is that Mr. Davis’s constitutional right to equal protection is being violated,” Horwitz says. The 14th Amendment protects prisoners from the right to be treated differently from similarly situated individuals because of their membership in an identifiable or protected class, such as race, religion, sex, or national origin. Based on the fact that white inmates in a similar situation receive home confinement, but Mr. Davis, a black inmate, has been repeatedly denied house arrest, I believe the BOP is applying the CARES Act in a discriminatory manner.
“He’s fixed equipment from all over … BOP buses from Miami,” Christies says, “and the central office is diverting heavy equipment from Terre Haute, Ind., to fix it. They’re denying him the CARES Act, so he can save millions of dollars.”
According to Christie, Davis has prison staff members telling him to stop working, believing it might have helped him get home confinement. “If he doesn’t go to work, that’s a violation and I could end up putting him in isolation in the Special Housing Unit,” Christie said, “It’s starting to look like something out of the movie Shawshank Redemption.”
In April 2023, Davis filed a civil suit against the director and the BOP for failing to approve her home confinement under the CARES Act, citing the facility’s lack of health and safety measures for prevent the spread of COVID-19 along with facility eligibility requirements. by the CARES Law. Specifically, Davis claims that “the BOP will be enjoined from its discriminatory practices” and that he would be placed on home confinement under the CARES Act (expires April 2023). The government/BOP will respond to the demand by the end of November 2023.
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