Lawyers in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington committed "egregious misconduct" in their handling of discovery in a lawsuit that challenges how the Federal Bureau of Prisons treats inmates classified as terrorists, a judge said this week.

Randall Todd Royer, also known as Ismail Royer, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after he admitted helping individuals gain access to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. He was housed in the general prison population for the first three-and-a-half years of his confinement, but claims he was subjected to more restrictive conditions after prison officials designated him as a "terrorist inmate" in late 2006.

Royer, a U.S. citizen born in Missouri, filed two lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons in 2010 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He accused the bureau of failing to follow rulemaking processes required by federal law in adopting the "terrorist inmate" program. He also alleged the prison system wrongfully classified him as a "terrorist inmate" based on false information and denied him the opportunity to challenge the designation.

Senior Judge Royce Lamberth denied the government's efforts to dismiss both cases in March 2013. Royer's attorneys made requests for discovery in June 2013. In the months that followed, Lamberth, in a Jan. 15 order, said the bureau's lawyers in the U.S. attorney's office committed a series of "egregious" errors. The judge cited missed deadlines, the production of discovery on a rolling basis and the submission of information without the proper signature.

"Even novices to litigation know that answers to interrogatories must be signed under oath," the judge wrote. Lamberth ordered the government to produce outstanding information to Royer's lawyers and to pay attorney fees....

"The whole point of this litigation is whether defendant can continue to single out plaintiff for special treatment as a terrorist during his continued period of incarceration," Lamberth wrote. "Did any supervising attorney ever read this nonsense that is being argued to this Court?"...

Kirkpatrick said Lamberth "appropriately recognized that there's some real urgency to produce the discovery."

"There's a real risk in a case like this that the government can simply run out the clock," Kirkpatrick said. "[Royer] could ultimately be released and his claims would be moot if the government was able to drag this out for a very long time."...

He claimed his "terrorist inmate" designation was based on information prosecutors in the criminal case acknowledged was false linking Royer to Al Qaeda. Although the trial judge ordered the government to delete the information from Royer's pre-sentencing report, Royer claimed the Bureau of Prisons kept the inaccurate information in its records and used it to make the "terrorist inmate" classification.

Royer also accused the Bureau of Prisons of adopting the "terrorist inmate" program without going through the processes laid out in the federal Administrative Procedure Act....