Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Dangerous Court Nominee
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on May 22, 2008, Printed on May 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/86095/
In 2004, Estelle Richardson=92s lifeless and battered body was found on
the floor of a Corrections Corp. of America prison cell. Four years
later, that unsolved homicide has come back to haunt Republican
stalwart "Gus" Puryear, the nation=92s top private prison litigator and
Bush nominee for US District Court. We talk to journalist Silja Talvi.
[Read AlterNet's two-part investigative series this interview is based
on by Talvi]
Amy Goodman: We turn now to an unfolding controversy over a Bush
administration nominee for the federal bench. Just under a year ago,
President Bush nominated Gus Puryear to serve on the US District Court
in Tennessee's Middle District. Puryear is a Nashville attorney and
general counsel for the Corrections Cor****ation of America, the
largest private prison company in the United States. If he's approved,
Puryear would be presiding over the same district where the CCA's
headquarters are based.
Puryear is now coming under new scrutiny for his role in the CCA's
handling of a prisoner death at its Nashville jail. The victim, thirty-
four-year-old Estelle Richardson, was found dead with a cracked skull,
four broken ribs in her solitary confinement cell. Four guards were
implicated in what was later ruled a homicide.
The CCA eventually settled out of court with Richardson's family. No
charges were filed against the guards. But a major new investigative
piece on the website Alternet.org says Richardson's death could come
back to haunt Puryear's nomination for the federal bench.
Silja Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times and author of the
book Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the US Prison System.
Her latest article, "Meet Gus Puryear," is online in two parts at
Alternet.org. Silja joins us from Seattle, Wa****ngton. ... Tell us
about Gus Puryear.
Talvi: =85 Gus Puryear's story wouldn't have been of particular interest
for me or to me, had it not been for the fact that I had been
following Estelle Richardson's case for years. I first came across a
brief blurb about her murder back in -- well, it was four years ago --
and wanted to do something to include her story in my book. I had a
gut instinct that something terrible had happened to this woman. I
tried to track her story over the years and could get very little by
way of any information. And very suddenly, in an unusual way, some of
this information started to fall into place, and it happened to
revolve around this man, Gus Puryear, and his bid for this federal
judge****p.
So, he is, as you rightly point out, up for a lifetime appointment. He
was nominated last year. And if appointed, that would indeed be for
life. And one of the things that people have been bringing up, and
rightly so, is that as a thirty-nine-year-old, he's only brought one
federal case to trial so far. So with a real paltry legal background,
there's already the question of, why is he even nominated in the first
place? And once some of this stuff started to come up around what he
had actually done or has done as general counsel for CCA, that's
really gotten a lot of organizations involved in opposing his
nomination.
Goodman: So tell us, in this case of Estelle Richardson, first
focusing specifically, then we'll go larger with Corrections
Cor****ation of America, explain what happened to her and explain what
Gus Puryear had to do with it.
Talvi: She was in the process of trying to find herself in a better
place in her life, she headed from Michigan to Tennessee in 1999, and
she was actually going down there initially to be a surgical
assistant. She was looking for a better life for herself and for her
two children. As single mom, she had really been trapped in a very,
very low-income, dead-end job as a telemarketer. And so, she headed
down there.
Unfortunately, she found that the job op****tunities weren't what she
had expected. The school op****tunities weren't what she expected. And
she started hustling, like a lot of women do on low end, basically
selling prescription pills. Initially she was just acquiring those
prescription pills, then she got hooked on them. And she was first
picked up around 2001, 2002, and was given a suspended sentence.
Unfortunately, her UA subsequently came up dirty. And then she
actually was found guilty of food stamp fraud.
And so, she entered the penal system in 2004 in April. By July, July
5th, she was found dead in her cell, unresponsive at 5:37 in the
morning. And what we found out subsequently was that she had actually
been in solitary confinement for three weeks prior to what then turned
out to be a murder, begging the question of who exactly had committed
the murder and what exactly had happened to her in that process.
Goodman: And so, what happened with the case? Were guards charged?
Talvi: Guards were actually charged. They were charged, however, a
year and three months after the situation happened, so after her death
had already been ruled a murder. And there were actually five guards
involved that we know of -- one woman and four men -- who had been
involved in and had been recorded by fellow inmates in that kind of
solitary cell area. Mind you, this is a twenty-three-hour lockdown
area. No one comes and goes freely. And we know that there were four
men and one woman who had apparently over the course of three weeks
beaten this woman to the point where she was bleeding from her ear on
a regular basis and trying to use tampons and pads to stuff her ear to
keep the bleeding from bleeding all over her sheets and her towels and
the floor, which happened anyway. So what we know is that the guards
were eventually charged and that those charges were then dropped once
the Richardson family had settled with CCA for what was then an
undisclosed amount of money.
Goodman: And Gus Puryear's role in the settlement?
Talvi: He was actually very involved to the very last minute. What he
did was to hire a bevy of law firms. This is what CCA does; they work
with outside law firms. And they got to work on this family and making
sure that they were going to sit down at the table for a settlement.
She had two minor children, so they were ostensibly the primary
concern. But as he himself brags in the testimony to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, he was proud to be able to say that on February
22nd, 2006, he sat with the family, sat with everyone until everyone
had reached an agreement, and everyone basically went home happy. And
that's his version of the event.
Now, in truth, none of this would have even been of any significance.
No one would have paid attention, CCA always involved in these kinds
of situations. Scandals, riots, you name it, suicides, murders, CCA
has it going on. The thing that makes this different is that Gus
Puryear actually went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and
initially kind of just waived off these concerns or these questions
around Estelle Richardson's death. And I think he was surprised, but
basically he came across as saying, "You know what? First of all, it's
not really a big deal, in essence" -- and I'm paraphrasing -- but he
said, "You know, she could have died any number of ways, and I don't
believe necessarily that her death was a murder at all. In fact she
could have fallen and cracked her head on the floor or on the wall,"
when in fact the top medical examiner for the State of Tennessee had
examined her body right afterward and said that she had basically died
of massive sustained blunt force trauma -- so her head, her ribs, her
organs -- that this was the kind of injury that you would see, for
instance, in a car crash, a deceleration injury is what it's called.
And so, when Puryear tried to spin this and say, "You know what? She
could have fallen against a wall or hit a floor with her head, having
a seizure," and to their credit, the Senate Judiciary Committee
members started saying, "Wait a second, wait a second. This doesn't
sound right." And they followed up with questions that then he had to
in turn respond to, and he did so, but rather poorly. And so there are
still these remaining questions around why precisely he continues to
dance around the fact that her death was indeed ruled a murder.
Goodman: Let's go further into the background of Gus Puryear,
President Bush's nominee, judicial nominee. Tell us about his rise.
Talvi: He's a rather young man. He's about my age, thirty-nine years
old. And he started out with money. He's basically blue blood, went to
an exclusive Christian high school. He went on to Emory, and then from
there he got his law degree. And he went -- and he -- actually only
three years that he served as a practicing attorney with a law firm
where he was more or less, as they say, an assistant. He also clerked
under a Judge Barksdale, who was also an appointee, a Bush Sr.
appointee. He's only -- in that time, he only handled, by himself,
five trial -- five federal cases, and one of those went to trial, and
that ironically was that of a prisoner. And as he says very dryly in
one of his interviews, "We lost." And so, that was really his first
and only exposure to that side of dealing with prisoner litigation.
Once he actually got recruited -- I should backtrack and say he also
worked for Senator Frist, and he was involved or friends with a "good
guy" named Philip Perry, who turns out to be Dick Cheney's son-in-law.
And so, Philip Perry, who's very much a Beltway insider, set him up to
basically do the debate prep for the 2000 and the 2004 vice-
presidential debates. So he's very much the GOP stalwart and always
has been, and his donation dollars reflect that. He's given about
$13,000 in donations to the GOP since 2001. In 2003 -- this is just to
show you what kind of a symbolic guy he is -- he gave $2,000 to the
Bush reelection campaign, that was on September 11, 2003.
Goodman: You talk about the sup****t, but also the criticism, when he
went before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Can you talk about who
came out for and against him?
Talvi: Well, at that point, actually, it wasn't a question of for and
against. At that point, there really were no fors. It was a given that
this man was going to just be waved into that position. Nobody was
even blinking an eye. It was an obvious. Well, here's this great --
you know, he's a golden boy of the GOP. He's just going to be waved
right on in.
Unbeknownst to him, the Senate Judiciary Committee had received a list
of questions and some information from a guy named Alex Friedman, who
was a former CCA prisoner who's also an associate editor at Prison
Legal News and has worked with a number of private corrections
organizations. And he forwarded that information to the committee, and
the committee actually paid attention and said, "Well, who is this
Estelle Richardson? Tell us about her. Tell us about her case." And I
was very pleased to see that this kind of thing actually does work
this way. They started asking these questions. He was obviously taken
by surprise. And that was when he first uttered his statement around,
"Well, you know, she could have -- she could have fallen. She could
have cracked her head this way."
Goodman: But you have people like Thurgood Marshall, Jr. and the
primary attorney who sued CCA on behalf of Richardson's two children
sup****ting him in the end, once he came under this criticism.
Talvi: ... It actually happens ... pretty rapid-fire after that point.
There's this sort of scramble around, "Oh, my god, what do we do to
make sure that he's backed up?" And so, all of a sudden these letters
start showing up, and one of the first is indeed Thurgood Marshall,
Jr. And initially I'm thinking, "What? You know, what on earth?" And
they're also using him to deflect the criticism around this Belle
Meade Country Club that Puryear belongs to, which only admitted its
first African American member in 1994, and to this day only has one
member who's black, who's in another state, so who doesn't actually
ever show up in the country club.
Goodman: We only have twenty seconds. But putting his career at CCA,
the largest private prison company in this country, into a larger
context.
Talvi: CCA is now -- represents the fifth largest prison system in the
United States. Puryear sits atop that system. Were he to be given this
position, he would sit atop a district court that basically governs
that entire area, including CCA's national headquarters. He would
ultimately be responsible for deciding the fates of hundreds upon
hundreds of prisoners.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news
program, Democracy Now!
=A9 2008 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86095/
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