SEATTLE — Released this month from the Monroe State Reformatory after serving 17 years for murder, Paul Wright is trying to make right something he says is wrong.
As editor of Prison Legal News, Wright was a muckracking journalist and crusader while he was at Monroe. Now, he’s attempting to use state public records laws to get the names of disciplined medical providers and information on any deaths caused by their work.
He told The Seattle Times that he felt lucky to "get out of prison with just a chipped tooth they wouldn’t treat."
Wright said he has the case of the prison nurse who sutured a cut with Krazy Glue, and the pharmacist’s assistant who forged prescriptions for his Demerol habit, and the inmate with Hepatitis C who died from being denied medicine.
The Department of Corrections disputes Wright’s depiction of its medical care. It has convinced two lower-court judges that naming names would undermine prison safety.
The dispute may now end up in the Washington State Supreme Court. Wright’s lawyers have petitioned for a ruling that weighs the public’s right to know against a prison warden’s need to keep the peace.
Aided by a team of First Amendment lawyers, the monthly magazine Wright edits, Prison Legal News, has battled for the magazine to be distributed in prisons across the country.
The corrections department briefly banned Wright’s magazine after it published a story about racist corrections officers and had to devote much of one secretary’s time to answering Wright’s frequent records requests.
"Every (prison) system has jailhouse lawyers," said Eldon Vail, the department’s deputy secretary. "It’s part of doing business. There are others before Paul, there will be others after him."
In response to Wright’s request in 2000 for medical-misconduct records, prison officials released a 6-inch stack of documents. But so much was blacked out that much of the information was incomprehensible. Blacked out were names of disciplined medical staff, prisoners’ ailments, dates, even the members of the Personnel Appeals board.
Prison Legal News appealed the redaction, first to Thurston County Superior Court, then to the Court of Appeals, losing both times.
Records of state-employee misconduct are routinely released by state agencies.
But the department’s task should give the agency a break from disclosure, Vail said. Prisoners armed with misconduct reports may attack or blackmail medical providers, he said, or avoid the disciplined providers, putting a burden on other medical staff.
"I can see that the public does need to know we did discipline, and did try to remove (an employee) or correct behavior," Vail said. "The problem with the public-disclosure law is it doesn’t differentiate between the public and an offender."
Wright’s release on Dec. 16, off a 1987 first-degree murder conviction stemming from a robbery, likely won’t end his clashes with the department.
After moving to New England to join his wife, he plans to continue filling Prison Legal News with stories from prisoner-correspondents around the country.
The publication was conceived as a Marxist magazine but evolved into what Wright calls a "farm report" for prisoners, including how-to legal advice. Most of its 3,500 circulation goes to lawyers and prison advocates.
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