During his years in prison, Jim had refused visits because they would be too painful, reminding him of the life he had left behind as a family doctor in Louisiana. But as the months ticked closer to the end of his sentence for healthcare fraud and distributing controlled substances, including OxyContin, his family convinced him that a visit could be the first step toward what his nephew Doug Hunt liked to call his “new life.”
“In our minds, now was the time to start prepping emotionally for him to say, ‘OK, yeah, we’re here, this is real,’” said Doug’s brother, David. They and some of their cousins have kept in close contact with their uncle over the years, especially after Jim’s surviving siblings died while he was in prison.
When David and his sister arrived in the heavily guarded visitation room at Rivers Federal Correctional Institute in North Carolina in December last year to see their uncle for the first time since his imprisonment, they were told that no touching was allowed.
“As soon as he got within a foot of us, we said the hell with it and we both hugged him together and didn’t let go for 15 minutes,” David said. “We weren’t supposed to do it, but the guards just let it go,” granting the elderly prisoner some leeway.
Soon they were all reminiscing, and Jim was cracking jokes. “We thought we might be going there to try and heal him, but it was not that way – he was healing us.”
After the visit and the subsequent phone calls, Jim started feeling hopeful about getting out, David said. The family converted the basement in his late sister’s house to a little apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen area with a microwave and small fridge so that he would have a place to call his own. They pooled their resources to gather everything he would need: clothes, shoes, a computer, even a wallet. They started making plans to see baseball games, take bike rides, go sailing.
Then came the day he finally left prison. April 15.
But there was a problem. Jim wasn’t a U.S. citizen. He was a Canadian with a green card, which had allowed him to practice medicine in the United States. Instead of immediately returning to his home country upon his release, as he had hoped, he was shackled and transferred to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Virginia to await an official deportation order from a judge.
An ICE spokeswoman said an order to transfer Jim to immigration officials, known as a “detainer,” was issued in his case in 2017 and a copy of those orders are provided to federal inmates.
But his nephew Doug said Jim still didn’t think he would be taken into an ICE detention center. “He didn’t realize that was going to happen,” Doug said. “He was a free man and still a prisoner.”
PAIN MANAGEMENT
Jim was in his 20s and the single father of two children when he decided to go to medical school at the University of Toronto, according to one of his daughters, Verity Hill. Saddled with thousands of dollars in student loans after graduation, he answered the call of recruiters looking for doctors and nurses to move to communities in the United States, said nephew Doug. Jim had two more kids with a second wife, but they split up and she returned to Canada when the children were small, Doug said.
Jim was practicing as a family doctor in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2006 when a warrant was issued for his arrest. A patient claimed she paid $100 for an office visit but received a prescription for narcotics from Jim’s office manager without being examined, according to an affidavit from an FBI agent supporting the warrant.
A subsequent indictment charged Jim with 80 counts of distribution of controlled substances for signing prescriptions for at least two dozen people without “a legitimate medical purpose,” and 32 counts of healthcare fraud for overbilling health insurance companies, according to court documents. The indictment also said Jim had improperly backdated a prescription. Prosecutors later alleged that the patient who received that prescription died more than a year later from an overdose of medications.
Jim, who had been in Canada, came back to turn himself in, thinking it was all a misunderstanding that would soon be resolved, according to his family members and letters he wrote at the time. He said his only goal was to ease his patients’ pain. His attorneys planned to introduce expert testimony that would say his prescriptions were medically appropriate and that he couldn’t be held responsible for patients’ abuse of narcotics, court documents showed.
“I have committed no crime. I will be fully exonerated,” Jim wrote Doug from prison on April 3, 2006. “As you said, strange places can sometimes provide a fulcrum for great changes. Right now I’m being small and still and letting breath carry me through the tenses while trying to melt into now.”
But Donald Washington, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, had a different view. Washington said in a press release the case demonstrated how “even medical doctors can become common criminals.”
By the end of 2006, after months in jail, Jim decided to plead guilty to one count of healthcare fraud related to improperly billing for office visits and one of distributing a controlled substance. On Christmas Day 2006, he wrote to his niece Jessica Marostega saying he had come to believe it was wise to take the deal because juries were unpredictable and the judge had partially limited what the expert witness could say in court. “Thus, in the balance of things, I acquiesced,” he wrote to his niece, who goes by Jess.
“I am being depicted in the local newspapers and television as a despicable common criminal and yet believe it or not, I feel blessed,” he said in the letter to Jess. “Within each shell of anxiety and discord there is a seed of peace and grace,” he wrote, signing off, “May the true spirit of Christmas penetrate your bones ... and warm you from within when the world is cold.”
With no prior criminal record, Jim thought his sentence wouldn’t be that long and told his family he expected to be home by late 2008 or early 2009.
Instead, U.S. District Judge S. Maurice Hicks decided to sentence Jim, who was 59 at the time, to more than 16 years in jail. At the time of the sentencing, Hicks said that Jim’s explanations for his actions were “little more than a low grade of baloney.” Contacted recently, Hicks and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Louisiana that prosecuted the case said they had no comment on the matter.
Randal Fish, one of Jim’s attorneys, said he was “floored” by the sentence. “It was an easy political move. They wanted to make a statement about doctors prescribing pain medication,” Fish said. “This guy was not a citizen, it was easy to hammer him, and it was just truly unfortunate.”
“THESE FOUR WALLS”
In 2012 and then again in 2015, the U.S. Justice Department denied Jim’s requests to be transferred to Canada because his long residency made him a “domiciliary” of the United States, according to family members and a copy of a denial letter. The Justice Department said it could not comment on international transfers because of privacy reasons.
With dwindling hopes of release, he tried to adjust to life in prison. The early years were hard.
“These four walls close in sometimes and the noise is unbelievable,” he wrote Jess in June 2006.
After he said he had been transferred to a different federal prison, he wrote Jess again in May 2007: “The food here is disgusting,” complaining of a serious salmonella outbreak. “A food worker told me the fish patties served are labeled ‘not for human consumption.’ It is apparently used to feed dolphins who are trained by the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf to hunt for sea mines. Maybe I’ll become as smart as a dolphin and learn to communicate using sonar!”
“I am just taking one breath at a time during this period of adaptation,” he said in the letter. The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.
He tried to focus on the positive. He had access to a small library and a few courses such as leather-crafting and guitar, he wrote in the letter. Over the years, he deepened his interest in Eastern medicine, wrote drafts of books on wellness and would help other prisoners with acupressure or simple advice on how to eat better to help control diabetes or other chronic illnesses, nephew David said.
When Jim finally agreed to a visit as his sentence neared its end, David was worried that his uncle would have a hard time seeing loved ones after so long, but he was amazed at his attitude.
“Jim didn’t seem like a broken man,” David said. “He had enthusiasm for life.”
HIGH RISK
Just as Jim began to emotionally prepare for his release and return to Canada, the coronavirus began spreading across the globe.
By the time he was transferred to the Farmville immigrant detention center in mid-April, the protocol was to quarantine him for 14 days. According to ICE guidance issued on April 10, all new detainees were supposed to be evaluated to see if they were at higher risk for serious illness from COVID-19, including if they were 65 or older. The ICE spokeswoman didn’t respond to a question about whether Jim was evaluated and said only that he was subject to mandatory detention.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Don't forget to drop your comment below.