A Brooklyn federal judge on Wednesday shot down a convicted felon’s request to be be sprung from jail to avoid getting the coronavirus — and gave him a bench slap for using the teleconference hearing to complain about his lawyer.
Renere Hightower, 35, was allegedly caught on camera on the night of Sept. 11, 2019 beating his girlfriend on a Bedford-Stuyvesant sidewalk — shoving her to the ground and pointing a .22 caliber pistol in her face — then brandishing the weapon at bystanders when they tried to come to her aid.
Hightower had asked to be allowed out on bail due to the virus pandemic and called into Wednesday’s teleconference hearing from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center — where four inmates and 16 staff members had tested positive for COVID-19 as of Wednesday, according to the US Bureau of Prisons.
While Hightower had an attorney present for him on the call, he kept griping to Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall that his case is based on “lies that are being made against me by the officers and the government” — and that he feels like he’s “not able to defend myself, or whatever” through lawyers who made “arguments wrongfully on my behalf.”
“I grabbed her. It was out of frustration, or whatever,” Hightower said. “I never slapped her. I never punched her.”
But Hall cut off Hightower as he tried to repeatedly asked for a “motion for a fair trial” and for a new attorney — and at one point appeared to lose her patience with the alleged perp.