A Pulaski County Circuit judge on Monday ordered state attorneys to hand over video recordings to a former Arkansas State Hospital nurse’s attorney, including one that the plaintiff says could exonerate her.
Gloria Daniel, a registered nurse, was fired in September 2010 for performance-related issues, state officials have said, but in her wrongful termination lawsuit against State Hospital officials, Daniel said they fired her because she acted as a whistle-blower in the death of a 19-year-old patient the year before.
During a pretrial hearing Monday, Judge Tim Fox told Assistant Attorney General Gary Sullivan to share the video with Luther Sutter, Daniel’s attorney, so the lawyer can review the material during the holidays.
Sutter had asked Fox to sanction the state nearly two weeks ago, saying the defendants lost a video that Daniel believes can help prove she was illegally fired.
Daniel sued former State Hospital chief administrator Charles Smith, alleging he fired her in retaliation for complaining that the hospital didn’t have the necessary equipment to save Gary Reatherford, a patient who died of an allergic reaction in August 2009 after he was fed shrimp for dinner.
Daniel also has sued another agency executive, Betty Mains, claiming sex and race discrimination in the nurse’s termination.
During Monday’s hearing, Fox denied the state’s motion for summary judgment, allowing the whistle-blower claims against Smith as the former chief administrator and the discrimination claims against Mains to go to trial.
Fox didn’t sanction Sullivan on Monday, holding off until the state attorneys passed along all the videos.
Sutter asked for sanctions Dec. 10 after claiming the state lost a video that would exonerate Daniel. Later Monday, Sullivan filed a response saying an information-technology employee helped to pull the video, Sutter said.
In that response, Sullivan said Fox didn’t need to issue any sanctions because the defendants didn’t lose or destroy any of the videos.
The trial scheduled for Jan. 7-9 will be the second in a year.
Fox declared a mistrial during the first trial in February 2012 after Sullivan overstepped the judge’s rules on evidence presented to the jury.
During the first trial, Sullivan said Daniel was fired 13 months after Reatherford’s death and after she improperly restrained another patient. He argued that a personnel committee reviewed Daniel’s performance with that patient, and Smith wasn’t involved in the termination decision. Mains approved the termination, he had said.
Sullivan repeatedly referred to past issues with other nurses at the hospital, but Fox had blocked the attorneys from bringing up those references in a pretrial order granted at Sullivan’s request.
In that pretrial hearing, Sullivan urged the judge to bar Sutter from referring to other nurses’ disciplinary histories and from presenting to the jury federal safety surveys of the hospital and several reports by a court-ordered monitor of hospital procedures.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 12/24/2013