‘He was in two weeks, let out for five or six days, and then today will be nine more weeks,’ Dr. Simone Gold said. ‘It’s unbelievable. Absolute torture.’
John Strand, who received a 32-month federal prison sentence for serving as the security detail for the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, is being held in long-term solitary confinement for doing a media interview, Dr. Simone Gold says.
Mr. Strand, 40, of Naples, Florida, testified on June 13 at a U.S. House field hearing on Jan. 6 issues shortly after being sentenced for convictions on five criminal counts, including felony obstruction of an official proceeding and four misdemeanors. He has appealed the convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“He was in two weeks, let out for five or six days, and then today will be nine more weeks,” Dr. Gold said in a Nov. 9 interview with The Epoch Times. “It’s unbelievable. Absolute torture.”
Mr. Strand apparently violated prison rules for doing a broadcast interview with Real America’s Voice host Grant Stinchfield. Dr. Gold said Mr. Strand did not realize he needed permission before speaking with the media from behind bars.
“They also are not giving him his mail. They are not allowing legal [counsel] visits,” Dr. Gold said. “This is just what they do.”
Another Jan. 6 inmate, InfoWars host Jonathon Owen Shroyer, is also in solitary confinement after his recent activity on social media.
Dr. Gold—an emergency medicine specialist from Los Angeles who founded America’s Frontline Doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic—was sentenced in June 2022 to 60 days in jail under a plea deal on one Jan. 6 count of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, a misdemeanor.
She and Mr. Strand were indicted together in February 2021. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to speak at a permit-approved event on medical freedom and COVID-19.
Her case was unusual because, according to Dr. Gold, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper had asked her on a date when they were students at Stanford Law School in the early 1990s. She turned him down—something she said influenced the judge’s sentencing decision in her case. Judge Cooper denied Dr. Gold’s assertion—and also denied motions from her and Mr. Strand demanding he recuse himself from their cases.
