With the Ingham County sentencing over... What's next for Larry Nassar? News Ten's Marcus Dash talked with a legal expert about where he may end up, serving his time behind bars, and what dangers he may face.
Nassar will probably never see the inside of a state prison because he first has to serve sixty years in a federal prison.
Defense attorney and former Cooley law school professor Ron Bretz told me that's probably the safest place for him to be.
"White collar criminals, this is the kind of inmate that populates the federal prison, very few murderers, frankly its a safer group of inmates if you can imagine such a thing," said Bretz.
Ron Bretz represented a lot of sex offenders at the state level many of them told him they were often made examples of by other state prison inmates.
Bretz says Nassar won't be in the company of those inmates.
"If a child sex abuser is murdered in prison it is not going to be another sex offender, it's going to be by a murderer oftentimes somebody that is serving for first-degree murder which is life without parole. There is nothing you can do to him, he'll do it right out in the open, it makes him a hero among the prisoners," said Bretz.
Bretz says even though the federal prison will be safer than the state prison Nassar will still be seen as the lowest on the totem pole of inmates and will have to consider asking for isolation.
"While that is done to protect him it is a worse punishment than the regular people in prison, why? Because in isolation you sit in a cell all by yourself for twenty-three hours a day and you get one hour a day to walk the yard," said Bretz.
Even if Nassar doesn't want to be in isolation, Bretz says the Federal Bureau of Prisons may give him no choice and put him in protective custody anyway.
"They don't want somebody being murdered in their prison if for only reason that it makes them look bad. I would like to think they have higher reasons for not wanting a murder in their prisons, but they dont so they are going to out of their way to protect him I believe," said Bretz.
I checked with the Michigan Department of Corrections, they tell me Nassar will stay in a county jail until after the Eaton county sentencing and then will be headed to a federal prison.
The state says Nassar will be put in high-profile protective custody if he makes it to a state prison.
