[Ppnews] Scott Sisters - How an $11 Robbery in Mississippi May End in a Death Sentence

[Political Prisoner News]

http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/about/for-jamie-scott-an-11-robbery-in-mississippi-may-carry-a-death-sentence/

March 5


How an $11 Robbery in Mississippi May End in a Death Sentence

The Terrible Case of Jamie Scott

By JAMES RIDGEWAY

On February 25, a small crowd gathered outside 
the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, to 
push for the release of sisters Jamie and Gladys 
Scott, who are serving two consecutive life 
sentences apiece for a 1993 armed robbery in 
which no one was injured and the take, by most 
accounts, was about $11. Supporters of the Scott 
sisters have long tried to draw attention to 
their case, as an extreme example of the 
distorted justice and Draconian sentencing 
policies that have overloaded prisons, crippled 
state budgets, and torn families apart across the 
United States. But in recent months, their cause 
has taken on a new urgency, because for Jamie 
Scott, an unwarranted life sentence may soon become a death sentence.

Jamie Scott, 38, is suffering from kidney 
failure. At the Central Mississippi Correctional 
Facility (CMCF) in Pearl, where Jamie and Gladys 
are incarcerated, medical services are provided 
by a private contractor called Wexford, which has 
been the subject of lawsuits and legislative 
investigations in several states over inadequate 
treatment of the inmates in its care. According 
to Jamie Scott’s family, in the six weeks since 
her condition became life-threatening, she has 
endured faulty or missed dialysis sessions, 
infections, and other complications. She has 
received no indication that a kidney transplant 
is being considered as an option, though her sister is a willing donor.

Jamie Scott’s family and legal advisors believe 
the poor health care she is receiving in prison 
places her life at risk. They have sent pleas for 
clemency or compassionate release to Governor 
Haley Barbour, whose tough-on-crime posturing and 
dubious record on issuing pardons do not bode 
well for Jamie. The Mississippi Department of 
Corrections (MDOC) has a provision for what it 
calls “conditional medical release,” but Scott is 
not a candidate, department spokesperson Suzanne 
Garbo Singletary said in an email last week, 
because “MDOC policy provides that an inmate must 
have a condition that is ‘incapacitating, totally 
disabling and/or terminal in nature’ in order to 
qualify.” So Jamie Scott appears to be caught in 
a deadly Catch-22: In order to be released from 
prison, she must convince the MDOC that her 
illness is terminal or “totally disabling”; but 
the only sure way for her to prove this is to die in prison.

Cruel and Unusual Health Care

In telephone interviews earlier this week, the 
Scott sisters’ mother, Evelyn Rasco, described 
the treatment Jamie has received at Central 
Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF), based 
on her own observations and information provided 
by her two daughters. Jamie, who has diabetes and 
bouts of high blood pressure, said that medical 
staff at the prison first diagnosed possible 
kidney problems in 1997–but until recently, she 
received minimal treatment outside of her regular 
insulin. Jamie’s physical and mental health 
suffered last fall when she spent 23 days in 
solitary confinement (for being found in an 
“unauthorized area” in the prison gym) and was 
cut off from her routine of work, classes, 
church, and occasional visits with her sister. 
Then, in mid-January, Jamie became seriously ill 
when both her kidneys began shutting down. She 
was sent to the prison infirmary and, after a 
week’s delay, taken to the hospital. There, 
doctors inserted a shunt in Jamie’s neck to allow 
her to receive dialysis through a catheter, and 
she was promptly returned to prison.

Rather than letting Jamie Scott leave the prison 
regularly for dialysis, prison authorities chose 
to truck in dialysis machines. About three times 
a week, Jamie has received hemodialysis in a 
trailer on the prison grounds­if the machines are 
working properly, which she reports isn’t always 
the case. At one session, Jamie told her mother, 
the blood was flowing out of her through a 
catheter into the dialysis machine­but it wasn’t 
flowing back in, so the treatment had to be 
stopped. At the end of January, another inmate 
looked in on Jamie, who was locked up alone in 
her cell, and found her unconscious. She was 
rushed to the hospital, where doctors told her 
there were problems with the shunt inserted into 
her neck. They made adjustments, and she was again taken back to prison.

Evelyn Rasco lives in Pensacola, Florida, where 
she cares for her daughters’ five children while 
they are behind bars. Since Jamie and Gladys went 
to prison, Rasco’s husband of 30 years died of a 
heart attack; another daughter died of congestive 
heart failure; and her oldest son was away for 
several years serving with the Army in Iraq. In a 
letter to supporters last year, Jamie Scott 
wrote: “When I think of the word ‘strongest,’ I 
think of my mother. She is 4 feet 9 inches tall 
and has the strength of Job in the Bible.”

Rasco lacks the time and financial resources to 
visit her daughters often, but in mid-February, 
she managed to make the trip to Mississippi. When 
she visited the prison on February 18, along with 
Jamie’s 18-year-old son, Jamie was feeling sick 
but was able to make it to the visiting room. 
When Rasco returned two days later, she found 
Jamie in a cell attached to the infirmary. “She 
was real weak,” Rasco said. “She couldn’t walk.” 
An infection appeared to have developed at the 
site of Jamie’s catheter, which had filled with 
blood and pus. Nurses reportedly told Rasco that 
Jamie should be in the hospital, but the paperwork hadn’t been done.

Rasco said that when she entered her daughter’s 
cell, Jamie was sitting on the edge of a hospital 
bed with dirty linens, near a toilet and wash 
bowl that had not been cleaned. Prison staff 
arrived with a plate of food­a hamburger swimming 
in grease, some side dishes, and a cookie–but 
Jamie said it looked so bad she couldn’t eat it. 
The doctors at the hospital had given her a list 
of foods she should eat, including meat, fish, 
and vegetables, but they were not available, and 
she did not have permission to purchase food at 
the prison commissary. (That permission has since 
been granted.) So Jamie sat on her grimy bed 
eating a Snickers bar. “She sat right there with 
me,” Rasco said, “and tried to give me a piece.” 
Knowing it was the only nourishment her daughter 
was likely to have, her mother declined.

Since Evelyn Rasco’s visit, Jamie was back in the 
hospital for a day after experiencing chest pains 
following dialysis, and to a clinic where her 
dialysis shunt was again adjusted and she was 
tested for infections. To date, the family does not know the results.

Evelyn Rasco also said that when Gladys Scott, 
34, learned of her sister’s kidney failure, she 
immediately offered to give Jamie a kidney. If 
Gladys were to prove a viable match, this would 
be by far the best medical option for Jamie: 
Studies show that patients in their thirties who 
receive successful transplants live considerably 
longer than those who remain on dialysis. Gladys 
says that CMCF staff told her that state 
prisoners don’t qualify as donors, and that a 
transplant would be too expensive, though there 
is no indication that their statements reflect 
official MDOC policy. Rasco said that she was 
hoping the prison would at least let Gladys to 
care for Jamie­feed her and bathe her­as inmates 
are sometime allowed to do for ailing relatives. 
When Rasco last spoke to her, Gladys had not received the necessary permission.

Chokwe Lumumba, a longtime activist and attorney 
who also serves on the Jackson City Council, is 
representing the family in the medical matter. In 
an interview last week, Lumumba said, “Our first 
idea is to get some medical attention into the 
jail. Asking for a private doctor to go in there 
and see her.” But what Jamie Scott really needs, 
he told me, is “to be in hospital until a kidney transplant.”

Suzanne Garbo Singletary, Director of the MDOC’s 
Division of Communications, replied to several 
email inquiries regarding Jamie Scott’s care. In 
one email, she wrote that “MDOC cannot comment on 
any specific medical condition or treatment for 
an inmate.” In another, she referred to patient 
privacy laws when asked whether a kidney 
transplant was being considered for Jamie Scott. 
Regarding transplants for state prisoners in 
general, Singltary said that “the state would pay 
for a needed and necessary transplant” and would 
do so “when evaluated the Dr. as needed [sic].” 
Singletary added in another message: “Dialysis 
units are fully operational with no malfunctions 
documented in the past several years.” She also 
restated the MDOC’s policy that “chronic, but 
stable, medical conditions are not eligible for 
conditional medical release consideration.”

At the Central Mississippi Correctional Center, 
Jamie Scott’s care is in the hands of Wexford 
Health Sources, a Pittsburgh-based private 
company that provides prison medical services. 
According to information compiled by the Private 
Corrections Working Group, Wexford’s record 
includes lawsuits by prisoners and current or 
former employees in at least four states, as well 
as allegations involving racial discrimination 
and improper gifts to public officials. In 2006, 
the Santa Fe Reporter launched an investigation 
into Wexford, which supplied health care to New 
Mexico’s 6,000 prisoners. It discovered 
widespread complaints about Wexford’s care.

Those who have raised concerns about Wexford 
include the company’s former regional medical 
director, the former medical director of Lea 
County Correctional Facility (LCCF) in Hobbs and 
numerous former and current Wexford medical 
employees. Their allegations are all hauntingly similar:

Wexford refuses to fill critical medical 
positions. Wexford refuses to grant off-site 
visits for seriously ill inmates. Wexford refuses 
to renew critical prescription medicine for 
inmates. And, according to those who worked for 
the company, and some who still do, the company’s 
insistence on the bottom line over the care of 
its charges causes inmates to suffer, sometimes 
with lasting, even fatal, results.

The investigation prompted hearings on prison 
health care in the New Mexico state legislature, 
and in December 2006, after just two years with 
Wexford, Governor Bill Richardson ordered the New 
Mexico Corrections Department to find a new health care provider.

Wexford’s reported resistance “to grant off-site 
visits for seriously ill inmates,” is 
particularly relevant to the case of Jamie Scott, 
and the potentially dangerous delays she has 
experienced before being sent to the hospital. 
The same issue surfaced in a 2002 case in 
Pennsylvania, where a 26-year-old prisoner named 
Erin Finley suffered a fatal asthma attack in 
prison while under Wexford’s care. According to 
the Wilkes Barre Times Herald, Finley’s family 
eventually received a $2.15 million settlement, 
after their lawyer presented evidence showing 
that “Finley desperately sought medical care for 
severe asthma she had had since she was a child, 
but she was repeatedly rejected based on a prison 
doctor’s belief that she was ‘faking’ her 
symptoms.” On the day of her death, Finley was 
taken to the prison infirmary several hours after 
complaining that she was having trouble 
breathing. A physician’s assistant examined her 
and told the doctor she needed to go to a 
hospital, “but he refused to see her and left the 
prison at 2:40 p.m. Twenty minutes later, Finley 
lost consciousness and stopped breathing,” 
according to the Times Herald. Finally she was 
sent to the hospital­only to be pronounced dead.

In Mississippi, where Wexford took over health 
care for the majority of the state’s prisoners in 
2006 under a three-year, $95 million contract, 
the Jackson Clarion Ledger reported in November 
2008 that “a search of the federal court system 
found more than a dozen open lawsuits filed by 
inmates against MDOC on medical issues.” At 
Central Mississippi Correctional Facility–the 
prison where the Scott sisters are housed­the 
sister of a dead inmate said she watched her 
brother waste away for months from inadequately 
treated Crohn’s Disease, an inflammation of the 
digestive tract. “He literally starved,” 
Charlotte Byrd said of her brother William Byrd, 
who died in November 2008. “We watched him turn 
into a skeleton.” Byrd told the Clarion Ledger 
that people might lack sympathy for prisoners 
like her brother, a convicted rapist, but “Even a 
dog needs medical attention.” She said she 
believes that “If they are doing him that way, 
they are going to let somebody else die, too.”

In fact, Mississippi has one of the highest 
prisoner death rates in the nation, according to 
a review of prison statistics carried out by the 
Jackson Clarion Ledger’s Chris Joyner, and the 
death rate in 2007 was 34 percent higher than in 
2006­the year Wexford took over the MDOC’s 
medical care. A December 2007 report conducted by 
the Mississippi Legislature’s Joint Committee on 
Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review 
(PEER) concluded that inmates were not receiving 
timely and adequate medical treatment from 
Wexford. Among other things, the PEER report 
found that Wexford “did not meet medical care 
standards set forth under its contract with the 
state,” and that the company “did not adhere to 
its own standards in following up on inmates with 
chronic health problems.” When questioned about 
the report and the high prisoner death rates, the 
Clarion Ledger reported, Corrections Commissioner 
Chris Epps “said he is satisfied with the 
contractor’s performance.” The budget presented 
by Epps for the coming fiscal year, which begins 
on July 1, 2010, shows a request of $37.4 million 
to Wexford for medical services.

In response to questions about care provided by 
Wexford, MDOC spokesperson Suzanne Garbo 
Singletary wrote: “Jamie Scott is receiving 
quality medical care for her condition. Wexford 
provides basic medical care for all inmates at 
MDOC prisons. Inmates are sent to hospitals if 
the need for hospital care arises.” Singletary 
stated that such decisions are made by the 
attending doctor at the prison, who is a Wexford 
employee. Wexford did not respond to requests for comment.

Unpardonable Offenses

Nancy Lockhart, a legal investigator and analyst 
based in South Carolina, has been working with 
Evelyn Rasco for several years, organizing a 
grassroots campaign to secure decent treatment 
for the Scotts and either a review of their case 
or some provision for their early release. In 
interviews last week, Lockhart said that she had 
helped Rasco appeal to the Obama Justice 
Department, which informed her that the statute 
of limitations was up for civil rights claims. 
They plan to try again, offering proof of earlier 
letters to the DOJ. They have also organized 
letter writing and email campaigns to numerous 
state and MDOC officials, and set up a web site. 
The Scott sisters’ group of supporters is 
growing, but they have received no meaningful responses to their pleas.

During her recent visit to Mississippi, Evelyn 
Rasco had the opportunity to confront Corrections 
Commissioner Christopher Epps in person when she 
attended a meeting at the state capitol on prison 
budget cuts. She spotted the Epps, whom she 
recognized from his photograph, walked up to him, 
and told him about her daughter’s poor health and 
the problems with her medical treatment. 
According to Rasco, Epps said that he was getting 
a lot of messages about Jamie Scott, and that he 
would do what he could obtain a pardon or 
clemency for the Scott sisters. He told her that 
he was “giving his word on this,” although he had 
no power to actually make it happen himself.

The person who could make it happen is Governor 
Haley Barbour, whose past record on pardons does 
not bode well for Jamie and Gladys Scott. 
Barbour, who took office in 2004, was initially 
known for refusing to grant any pardons. In his 
second term he changed course–but only for a 
particular set of offenders. A 2008 investigation 
by the Jackson Free Press found that Barbour had 
pardoned or suspended the sentences of five 
murderers, four of whom had killed their former 
or current wives or girlfriends. All five men 
were part of a prison trusty program under which 
they did odd jobs at the governor’s mansion. 
Writing in Slate, Radley Balko summarized Haley 
Barbour’s policy on pardons as “show[ing] mercy 
only to murderers who work on his house.”

Jamie Scott’s health crisis has also coincided 
with a protracted struggle between the governor 
and state legislators over how to handle budget 
shortfalls. Throughout, the ambitious Barbour, 
who is talked about as a possible 2012 
presidential candidate, has appeared determined 
to polish his reputation for being both fiscally 
conservative and tough on crime. With revenue 
down due to the recession, Barbour implemented a 
series of deep, across-the-board cuts to state 
spending in the current fiscal year. Last week 
the he vetoed a bill that would have restored 
some of that funding, primarily to education. At 
the same time, he asked the legislature to put 
$16 million back into the Department of 
Corrections budget. “We have the resources to 
restore funding to our priorities this year,” the 
governor said in a statement, “including law enforcement and corrections.”

Against opponents who argued that Mississippi 
already spends more on prisoners than it does on 
schoolchildren, Barbour held up the specter of 
what could happen if prison spending was cut: 
3,000 to 4,000 inmates would have to be released 
early. “The threat of convicted criminals on the 
streets,” the Jackson Free Press wrote earlier 
this month, “has provided Barbour a rhetorical 
trump card in budget negotiations.”

Jamie and Gladys Scott

Even amidst this kind of rhetoric, it would be 
difficult to see the Scott sisters as dangerous 
or violent offenders, although the state of 
Mississippi went to great lengths to depict them 
as such. On Christmas Eve of 1993, Jamie and 
Gladys, then 22 and 19, were both young mothers 
with no criminal records. They were at the local 
mini-mart buying heating fuel when they ran into 
two young men they knew, who offered to give them 
a ride. Sometime later that evening, the two 
young men were robbed by a group of three boys, 
ages 14 to 18, who arrived in another car, armed with a shotgun.

Jamie and Gladys say that they had already left 
the scene to walk home when the robbery took 
place, and had nothing to do with it. The state 
insisted they were an integral part of the crime, 
and in fact had set up the victims to be robbed. 
Wherever the truth lies, trial transcripts 
clearly reveal a the case based on the highly 
questionable testimony of two of the teenaged 
co-defendants–who had turned state’s evidence 
against the Scott sisters in return for 
eight-year sentences­and a prosecutor who appears 
determined to demonize the two young women.

Jamie and Gladys Scott were not initially 
arrested for the crime. But ten months later, the 
14-year-old co-defendant–who had been in jail on 
remand during that time–signed a statement 
implicating them. When questioned by the Scotts’ 
attorney, the boy confirmed that he had been 
“told that before you would be allowed to plead 
guilty” to a lesser charge, “you would have to 
testify against Jamie Scott and Gladys Scott.” 
The boy also testified that he had neither 
written nor read the statement before signing it. 
It had been written for him by someone at the 
county sheriff’s office, he said, and he “didn’t 
know what it was.” But he had been told that if 
he signed it “they would let me out of jail the 
next morning, and that if I didn’t participate 
with them, that they would send me to Parchman 
[state penitentiary] and make me out a 
female”­which he took to mean he would be raped. 
The 18-year-old co-defendant who testified 
against the Scott sisters also said he was 
testifying against the Scotts as a condition of 
his guilty plea to a lesser charge.

But the prosecutor succeeded in depicting Jamie 
and Gladys Scott not only as participants in the 
crime robbery, but as its masterminds­two older 
women who had lured three impressionable boys 
into the robbing the victims at gunpoint. (This 
despite the fact that the oldest of the 
co-defendants was just a year younger than 
Gladys, and was driving around with a shotgun in 
his car.) In his summation, he told the jury:

They thought it up. They came up with the plan. 
They duped three young teenage boys into going 
along and doing something stupid that is going to 
cost them the next eight years of their lives in the penitentiary.

That probably makes me, at least, as mad about 
this case, simply at least as much, as the fact 
that two people got robbed. That three young boys 
were duped into doing the dirty work.

The prosecutor also reminded jurors that while 
Jamie and Gladys Scott admittedly did not have a 
weapon, the judge’s instructions “tell you that 
if they encourage someone else or counsel them or 
aid them in any way in committing this robbery they are equally guilty.”

It took the jury just 36 minutes to convict the 
Scott sisters. And while there was a range of 
possible sentences for the crime of armed 
robbery, the state asked for­and received­two 
consecutive life sentences for the Scott sisters. 
In contrast, Edgar Ray Killen, the man convicted 
in 2005 of manslaughter in the 1964 deaths of 
civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney, and 
Goodman, received a sentence of 60 years–meted 
out by the same judge who presided over the trial 
of Jamie and Gladys Scott. A direct appeal, 
carried out by the same lawyers who defended them 
at trial, failed to overturn the Scotts’ conviction.

Because they were tried for a crime committed 
before October 1994, when even harsher sentencing 
rules were put in place in Mississippi, the Scott 
sisters will be eligible for parole in 2014, 
after they have served 20 years­though there is 
no guarantee they will receive it. In the 
meantime, Evelyn Rasco is praying for mercy, for 
a good lawyer­and for her daughter Jamie to live that long.

James Ridgeway can be reached at 
<http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/>Solitary 
Watch, where this article originally appeared.




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