Shadow Senator candidate Pete Ross being arrested on Capitol Hill in December. Photo by Benjamin R. Freed.

Pete Ross may be the only convict to be upset that he didn’t spend a night in jail, but then again he was also one of the few that actively requested jail time over any alternative.

Ross, a candidate for the D.C. shadow senator seat, was released from D.C. Jail last night at 10 p.m. after spending all of six hours of a day-long sentence behind bars. The imprisonment and subsequent release capped off a bizarre day in court where he asked a judge to jail him for blocking traffic during a December D.C. voting rights protest, only to be told that his opponent in the race, incumbent Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown, had placed a call to a judge to tell her that Ross was using the potential jail time for political purposes. (The phone call led Ross to ask for a new judge to sentence him, which one did—a day in jail and $50 in fines.)

In an interview this morning, Ross said that after being sentenced, he was transferred to the D.C. Jail along with 16 other inmates. (“They were interesting people,” he said of them. “They were very nice…we had lively conversations.”) At the jail’s intake unit, he swapped out his suit for a loose-fitting prison-issue jumpsuit and slippers, gave blood to check for HIV/AIDS and STDs and, much to his surprise, was released shortly thereafter.

“I was absolutely shocked,” he said, having expected to spend the night in jail with the general population, even though he had been offered a chance to be separated out. With little more than his clothes, $49.50 in cash and a Metro card, he took the train to Dupont Circle and jumped on a bus home.

Now a free man, Ross intends to continue his well-financed campaign for the unpaid shadow senator position. (He’s loaned his campaign $202,000 of his personal fortune.) And if he wins, his brief time in the D.C. Jail may be mere foreshadowing of what’s to come—Ross has said that if elected, his first order of business will be to demand that the U.S. Senate seat him, and if it doesn’t, refuse to leave until arrested.

“It’s only going to change through publicity,” said Ross of the District’s lack of voting rights and self-determination. “I think if I were a U.S. senator this would get more national attention.”