Slain KATV anchor's mother still fights to sue over prying

In this June 26, 2008 file photo released by KATV Television, news anchor Anne Pressly is pictured in Little Rock, Ark.
In this June 26, 2008 file photo released by KATV Television, news anchor Anne Pressly is pictured in Little Rock, Ark.

Almost eight years after TV news anchor Anne Pressly was fatally beaten in her Little Rock home, one final court battle remains.

But it doesn't involve her killer, Curtis Vance, now serving a life sentence in an Arkansas prison for capital murder, rape, burglary and theft.

Linked to Pressly's rape and slaying through his own words and DNA, Vance, now 35, was convicted by a Pulaski County jury in November 2009. He was spared the death penalty and has used up all of his appeals.

The legal question that remains is whether the hospital where Pressly was treated can be sued, along with a doctor and two former staff members, for illegally snooping into Pressly's medical records as she lay dying.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson said at a recent hearing that he hopes to reach a decision by the end of this week, a ruling that would come just before what would have been Pressly's 34th birthday.

Pressly's mother, Patti Cannady, sued St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center, staff members Candida Griffin and Sarah Elizabeth Miller, and Dr. Jay Holland in October 2009, about a month before the criminal trial.

The two hospital employees and the physician had pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor medical-privacy violations, for which they received probation and fines, sentences they have completed.

Griffin and Miller were fired from their hospital jobs. Miller, who looked at Pressly's records 12 times on the first two days that the TV personality was in the hospital, had been a patient-accounts representative at the hospital's Sherwood branch.

Miller said she didn't think she was breaking any laws by looking, testifying in the course of the litigation that she believed at the time that she would be breaking the law only if she had told anyone else what she'd seen.

Griffin accessed the records once on the day after Pressly arrived at the hospital after the badly beaten woman had been moved into intensive care.

Griffin had been the emergency-room unit coordinator at the main hospital in Little Rock and has testified during the litigation that she looked at the records only to see what room Pressly had been assigned to, trying to determine whether she had died.

Holland, owner of the Hillcrest Family Clinic, was not a hospital employee. He was medical director of Select Specialty Hospital, a St. Vincent tenant that has since closed in Little Rock.

Holland briefly looked at Pressly's records the day she was attacked, using his home computer to access the hospital's system. He told FBI agents he wanted to see whether Pressly was still alive.

St. Vincent suspended his privileges for two weeks and made him take an online training course about federal medical-privacy laws.

He also was fined $500 and reprimanded by state medical regulators in a separate proceeding. He told the Arkansas State Medical Board he looked at the record for 26 seconds, wondering whether he could help because of special wound-care training he's had that could significantly reduce scarring.

His attorney told board members that 17 people, including several doctors, had looked at Pressly's records but only Holland and the two women were charged.

Hospital officials acknowledged firing some employees in connection with the records breaches, but declined to elaborate.

Cannady's lawsuit estimates there could have been as many as seven other doctors involved with access like Holland's.

Cannady's lawsuit has been unsuccessful so far. The judge dismissed the case in October 2011, ruling that Cannady cannot assert privacy violations on behalf of her late daughter.

On appeal, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld that ruling but reinstated another claim made by Cannady: that the defendants' behavior had been so outrageous that she had been damaged by it.

At a hearing Thursday, attorneys for the defendants told the judge that Arkansas courts require such a high bar of proof to establish an "outrage" claim that those cases are rarely successful.

To be successful, Cannady would have to prove that the defendants engaged in behavior so "extreme and outrageous" that it "shocks the conscience," St. Vincent attorney Emily Runyon said.

"It has to be beyond all bounds of decency ... intolerable [behavior]," she told the judge. "Outrage simply does not exist in this case."

The courts have rejected outrage lawsuits against child molesters, she told the judge, asking whether just looking at medical records met that standard of bad behavior.

With fellow hospital attorney Sarah Cullen, Runyon also said the hospital could not be held responsible for what its employees, Miller and Griffin, had done. The women had been trained in medical privacy and warned against accessing records outside of their work, Runyon said.

The women clearly were acting outside the scope of their employment when they looked at Pressly's records to satisfy their curiosity, Runyon told the judge.

Cannady's attorney, Jim Schultze, disputed whether the women had been truly forthcoming in describing why they looked at the records.

The defendants all "violated the rules of civility we all live by" to satisfy their own "voyeuristic desires," and their explanations for why they looked at the records raises questions about the quality of St. Vincent's privacy training and whether the hospital should have foreseen something like this happening, he said.

"We're talking about an action that is utterly intolerable in a civil society," Schultze said. "This is conduct that can't be tolerated by a civil society."

Pressly, bright and blonde and with a flashing smile, was beaten beyond recognition in her 1940s-era rental home in Little Rock's upscale Heights neighborhood.

The Club Road house's owners sold it about eight months after she was killed, and the new owners tore it down to rebuild. Pressly's friends prayed and released pink balloons when demolition began. A 2,424-square-foot brick frame house, appraised at $516,800, was built on the site in 2010.

Movie director Oliver Stone, who'd given Pressly a small role in one of his movies, described her upon hearing of her murder as "a vibrant source of energy, life and kindness. In the time she had, she filled it with a big soul."

His movie, W., about President George W. Bush, had debuted in Little Rock three nights before Pressly was killed.

Pressly's mother found her daughter unconscious, covered in blood and struggling to breathe, on her bed on Oct. 20, 2008. The room was spattered with blood, with some flecks even reaching the ceiling.

Cannady had gone to her only child's home to check on her because she couldn't get Pressly to answer the phone, after trying more than 40 calls.

Cannady said she called her daughter regularly to make sure Pressly was awake at 3 a.m. so she could get to KATV, Channel 7, in time where she had just been promoted to her "dream job" as anchor for the Daybreak show.

Pressly's body was just barely holding on to life when rescuers took her to the emergency room about 30 minutes after her mother found her.

"She did not have a recognizable human face," said Dr. Theresa McBride, the emergency-room doctor who tended to Pressly that morning.

Pressly was struggling to breathe with almost no blood pressure and a barely detectable pulse, making her too injured for pain medication. Her chest had been partially crushed, and her left hand fractured, and she had cuts and bruises down to her feet, where one of her toes was broken.

A nurse who conducted a rape examination said she couldn't tell that Pressly was a woman, and doctors found evidence of sexual trauma. Doctors said she'd been struck at least a dozen times, at least five of them on the head, with many of those blows delivered with something harder than a human fist, a heavy blunt object, something metal or hardwood and relatively narrow.

McBride got her stabilized after 2½ hours, but Pressly never regained consciousness. Pressly's body kept going for another five days, but her brain had begun to die from injury and blood loss the same day she was found, doctors said.

It took Little Rock detectives 37 days to find her killer, linking him to the crime through a pubic hair fragment found on her bedding by police crime-scene examiners. DNA testing showed the hair came from Vance, a Marianna man with a history of theft and burglary who eventually admitted to attacking Pressly during a break-in two days before his 28th birthday.

A Pulaski County jury convicted Vance in 2½ hours after a three-day trial less than a year after his arrest but spared him the death penalty.

At his trial, Cannady described finding her daughter, wearing only a T-shirt and lying in the fetal position on her bloody bed.

"It was horrific," Cannady would later say. "I absolutely could not take the scene in. I could not imagine what I was seeing. I thought that someone must have slit her throat."

"I said, Anne, mama is here, mama is here," Cannady said.

She also told jurors about the last time she spent with her daughter, about seven hours before finding her. They had said their goodbyes for the night in front of the house where Cannady was staying with friends.

"She got in her car, and as she started to back down the driveway, I had the sense to run out to the car, and I sort of ran down the driveway with her, and she rolled down the window, and I was able to kiss her right here on the head and tell her that I loved her" Cannady said. "She said, I love you, too, mom."

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