The latest example of the strain of perversity running through Rethuglican ranks

U.S. Prosecutor Held in a Child Sex Sting Kills Himself

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, Oct. 5 — A federal prosecutor charged with traveling from Florida to Michigan to have sex with a 5-year-old girl committed suicide on Friday in prison, his lawyer said.

The prosecutor, J. D. Roy Atchison, 53, was arrested on Sept. 16 leaving a plane in Detroit as part of an Internet sting operation led by the sheriff’s department in Macomb County, Mich.

The authorities said he had been chatting online for two weeks with an undercover detective who posed as a mother offering to let men have sex with her young daughter.

At the time of his arrest, the authorities said, Mr. Atchison, of Gulf Breeze, Fla., was carrying a Dora the Explorer doll, hoop earrings and petroleum jelly.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said Mr. Atchison was found unresponsive on Friday morning in the special housing unit of the federal prison in Milan, Mich. He had been transferred there after trying to hang himself in the Sanilac County Jail days after his arrest.

Mr. Atchison was initially on suicide watch at the jail, but was removed after assuring his lawyer and a judge that he would not harm himself. He was returned to suicide watch at the Milan prison, said his lawyer, James C. Thomas of Detroit.

Mr. Thomas said he had heard, but not confirmed, that Mr. Atchison had hanged himself in the shower.

“I think they don’t put somebody in there to watch you when you’re in the shower,” he said. “But you have cameras and people watching you as you’re going in.”

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, Felicia Ponce, would not provide details of the matter but said Mr. Atchison had been living in a one-person cell in the special housing unit.

Ms. Ponce said the unit was for inmates who were segregated from the rest of the prisoners.

She said an ambulance took Mr. Atchison to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at 10:17 a.m.

“A thorough investigation is under way,” she added.

Mr. Thomas said he would seek to have the charges against his client dismissed, adding that prosecutors are sometimes willing to do so when a defendant dies.

He would not comment on Mr. Atchison’s state of mind leading up to his death nor on whether Mr. Atchison thought that he had been wrongly accused.

“We’re not going to talk about that, ever,” Mr. Thomas said.

Mr. Atchison had pleaded not guilty to charges of traveling across state lines to have sex with a child younger than 12, using the Internet to entice a minor and traveling to another state to engage in illicit sex. If convicted, he could have faced a sentence of 30 years to life in prison.

Mr. Atchison was an assistant United States attorney in Pensacola and a volunteer coach for girls’ softball and basketball teams in Gulf Breeze. His wife and three children were said to be as stunned by the charges as other residents of their affluent town.

In a statement, Mr. Thomas said: “This is a man who has done a lot of good in his life. Unfortunately, he is going to be judged by his most recent charges and what we have read in the media, and not by the goodness, hard work or by the love of his family.”

Original article posted here.