Judge WM. Fremming Nielsen of the Washington Eastern District Court made his ruling after hearing the arguments of Assistant U.S. Attorney James J. Benedetto, the prosecutor, and court-appointed defense attorney Joseph James Norita Camacho, who is representing Tyron Farley Reyes Fitial, 24.
Nielsen remanded Fitial to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service after the hearing.
Fitial, who has denied the charges, has been incarcerated since June 11, 2010 after the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested him.
“There is nothing in [Fitial’s] background to suggest that he has a propensity for violence,” Camacho earlier told the court in his written motion for bail modification.
Camacho further told the court that the “right to pretrial release is fundamental.”
He said Fitial’s mother and his partner were suggested as third party custodians for his client.
In an e-mail to the Variety, Benedetto, who moved that Fitial remain in custody, said Nielsen ruled that the Bail Reform Act “only allows for a detention hearing to be reopened if the movant comes forward with new information, not known at the time of the original detention hearing, that is material to the issue of dangerousness or flight risk.”
Benedetto cited case law that “stands for the proposition that the testimony or availability of your friends and family to be a third party custodian is not new information, since you knew about them when the original hearing was held.”
Benedetto said Fitial already had two detention hearings before his bail motion, one before Judge Consuelo Marshall, and one before Judge David Carter.
“Both judges found that there was no condition, or combination of conditions, that would ensure the appearance of [Fitial] and the safety of one or more persons and the community,” Benedetto said.
The federal prosecutor added: “In fact, Judge Marshall made a specific finding, based on the testimony of an FBI agent, that there was a serious risk that [Fitial] would seek to ‘threaten, injure or intimidate’ one or more of the government’s witnesses.”
Last August, Fitial fired his first court-appointed defense attorney for failing to secure his pretrial release.
Judge Nielsen earlier vacated Fitial’s jury trial for Dec. 6, 2010, and set a new trial date for Feb. 7, 2011.
