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Geoffrey Fieger told jurors Wednesday they would hear evidence that Sedgwick County Jail inmate Terry Bruner “died a slow, slow, slow death while these two jailers literally watched.”
They had to know that Bruner was seriously ill, Fieger said, referring to jail deputies Mary Staton and Marque Jameson.
The deputies’ attorney, Arthur Chalmers, told the jurors the deputies had the best intentions. For most of Bruner’s stay in the jail, he didn’t seem that ill, Chalmers said. Why, Chalmers asked, would they intentionally ignore him?
That gets to the key question the jurors will decide: Whether the two deputies showed deliberate indifference to Bruner, 46, who died in March 2008 after being transferred from the jail to a Wichita hospital.
The two attorneys – Fieger, a Michigan lawyer who defended “Dr. Death” Jack Kevorkian, and Chalmers, with a private Wichita firm – gave opening arguments in U.S. District Court in Wichita in a trial that is expected to last about seven days.
“This case is an important one … both sides have a lot at stake,” U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil told potential jurors during the jury selection.
When Bruner’s survivors filed the lawsuit in 2010, it sought $10 million in damages.
In his opening argument, Fieger said Bruner was serving a jail sentence for drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident. Because the Sedgwick County Jail was overcrowded, it “farmed out” Bruner to the Stanton County Jail, he said. Bruner had a pre-existing medical condition: cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis C, and everyone knew it because “it was all over his medical records,” Fieger said. The condition made Bruner more susceptible to illness, and under the Constitution, he had a right to proper care in jail, Fieger said.
In March 2008, Bruner became ill with a “common bug” that can lead to pneumonia if not treated with common antibiotics, Fieger said. When Bruner became clearly ill in the Stanton County Jail, “Stanton didn’t want him anymore” and called the Sedgwick County Jail, saying, “Mr. Bruner is real sick. We need to send him back to you, and you get him real medical care. … He needs it immediately,” Fieger said. Without antibiotics, Bruner’s lungs were starting to fill with fluid. The situation caused his blood to become infected and swelled his brain to the point he stopped breathing, Fieger said.
Instead of getting medical help when he was returned to the Sedgwick County Jail, he went into a maximum-security pod, and “nobody knows why,” Fieger said. From March 6 until he became comatose on March 10, Bruner was locked in a cell, and no doctor or nurse saw him. By the time he got medical help, he was “essentially brain dead,” Fieger said.
“It’s not as if they didn’t know what was going on,” he said, adding that Bruner was vomiting, coughing, moaning and not eating, drinking or bathing. Inmates kept telling the deputies that Bruner needed help. “Not one of them calls a doctor” or 911, Fieger said.
“And the reaction of these guards is he’s faking.”
On Bruner’s last day in the jail, Staton, one of the two defendants in the lawsuit, saw Bruner walking around aimlessly, Fieger said. Later that day, when Jameson, the other lawsuit defendant, found Bruner in a fetal position in his vomit on his cell floor, he lifted him to a cot and locked the door, he said.
When Chalmers, the attorney defending the two deputies, had his turn, he told jurors that cruel and unusual punishment means deliberate indifference. And that doesn’t fit with the two deputies’ actions, Chalmers said.
They didn’t understand that Bruner needed to see doctor, Chalmers said. Bruner’s liver disease had weakened his immune system.
He described Staton as a mother and Scout leader and Jameson as a young man involved in athletics. Staton had been assigned to a booth from which she could see inmates when they came out of their cells. Jameson was assigned to rove among the pods. Because of federal privacy rules, deputies don’t know an inmate’s medical history, Chalmers said.
“What you know is what you see, is what you’re told that day,” he said.
Bruner didn’t have broken bones, wasn’t sweating, wasn’t coughing, he said. Instead, Bruner seemed to have a mental health issue, and Staton contacted a sergeant about getting Bruner a check from mental health staff, and the staff was going to see him during normal rounds.
Even when Jameson picked Bruner up off the floor, and told Staton that Bruner wasn’t doing well, “again, he doesn’t appear to be really sick,” Chalmers said. It’s not odd for inmates to sleep on their cell floor, he said.
When the staff checked on Bruner the afternoon of the 10th, they determined that Bruner needed to go to the in-house clinic, where medical professionals decided several hours later to transfer him to a hospital, Chalmers said.
Chalmers indicated that evidence will show that some of the symptoms that Bruner had could appear to be the flu or a cold.
He argued that the deputies had no motive to ignore Bruner and that Bruner could have asked for help but didn’t.
