There's Been A 'Mass Release Of Felons' Because Of One FBI Agent

At least a dozen people doing time for serious drug crimes in Washington, DC have been released from prison because of a single FBI agent's "possible misconduct," The Washington Post reports.

The nature of the FBI agent's misconduct isn't clear, and the agent hasn't been criminally charged or even named publicly. (The agent has been suspended indefinitely, though.) But defense lawyers involved in the cases call the "mass freeing of felons" an unprecedented move that suggests the convictions could be overturned, according to the Post.

For now, most of the freed felons are on home detention while the US attorney's office in DC reviews the cases one by one. In one case, a guy who had served just nine months of a 10-year prison sentence at a federal prison in North Carolina got to go home to DC.

"I've never, ever seen something like this before," Robert Lee Jenkins Jr., a lawyer for one of the freed defendants, told the Post. "It suggests to me that whatever is going on is very significant."