A federal judge agreed Wednesday to set an expedited hearing for a 22-year-old prison inmate suing the state prison system for refusing him medications to prevent his transplanted kidney from failing.
Calling the situation, "critical and life threatening," Varner Unit inmate Alexander Gilliana's attorney, John Wesley Hall, appealed in the civil suit filed Tuesday for preliminary and permanent injunctive relief.
The case is set for a hearing on the motion at 1 p.m. May 28 in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson.
Gilliana -- who was sent to prison in January for possession of a firearm on school property and is eligible for release in September -- lost both kidneys to disease when he was 6. He was on dialysis for six years until he had a kidney transplant when he was 12.
Gilliana now requires seven drugs twice a day, 12 hours apart, to prevent rejection of his kidney, Hall said.
"You don't get the kind of medical care in prison that you'd get in the street," Hall said.
The lawsuit names about 32 defendants, including the Arkansas Department of Correction, Varner Unit Warden Randy Watson and Correct Care Solutions Inc., which contracts with the Correction Department to provide medical care to its more than 16,000 inmates.
Correction Department spokesman Cathy Frye said Wednesday that she could not comment on pending litigation. When asked about the general routine when inmates require medications for previous transplants, Frye said she could not comment because it related to the lawsuit and referred questions to the Arkansas attorney general's office.
Judd Deere, a spokesman for Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, said the office was reviewing the case.
Hall claims in the lawsuit that Gilliana is being refused his regular and full dosage of all of his medications, saying "it was not uncommon for him to go up to a week without the drugs."
The motion also claims that the medical care staff falsified prison records to show that he sometimes refused the medications.
There were times when Gilliana was ordered to sign "refused" on the medication log when they didn't have medication for him or was ordered to take two doses in quick succession rather than every 12 hours, Hall said. When Gilliana declined to write "refused" after Hall advised him to do so, prison or medical personnel wrote it for him, Hall added.
"Why would a person who needs a drug to live and has taken it for 10 years suddenly refuse it? He's not in there on a suicide wish; he's going to be paroled in September," Hall said.
Hall said he wrote repeated letters to Corrections Board President Benny Magness and Correction Department Director Wendy Kelley. Both said they were addressing the situation, Hall said.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette requested the communication Wednesday from the Correction Department but had not received the documentation as of late Wednesday.
"She responded with a letter. Magness has spoken to me. It's an unwieldy organization. They can issue a directive, but then nothing gets done," Hall said. "I feel bad for waiting so long to file a suit. We tried to resolve it first. I waited as long as I could in good conscience. I didn't want to file a lawsuit, but this kid could die."
State Desk on 05/21/2015