Imagine a criminal.
Not a murderer sentenced to life without parole, but something bad: rape, assault, drug trafficking.
Imagine that the criminal was sentenced to many years of incarceration, and after decades in prison his body has begun to break down and die. He has years left on his sentence but only months left to live. A series of health emergencies have incurred huge costs and strained the resources of the prison where he is held.
Would you accept that such an inmate could be paroled for the final months of his life, if it was guaranteed that he posed no threat and that his release would save taxpayers potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars?
That is the idea behind Oklahoma’s revised medical parole statute, signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2021 with the goal of increasing the number of paroles granted.
It may not be working as planned.
Oklahoma City attorney Aaron Easton has begun representing an inmate who is seeking compassionate release. Easton has found the revised medical parole statute to be convoluted and frustrating.
“It’s a very arduous process, seldomly successful, but if there’s a candidate, it’s him,” Easton said of his client. “We are having the hardest time just getting one step started.”
An American Tragedy
Now imagine that you’re not imagining.
In 2008, Easton’s client, James Havens, then 54 with no previous criminal record, pleaded guilty to killing his wife, Brenda Havens. Seventeen years later, he is dying of prostate cancer.
Havens was an all-American kid, an altar boy and football player who could frame a house and pour foundations before he graduated high school.
He married his childhood sweetheart and fathered two lovely daughters who recalled the successful construction business their father founded.
Havens was known as a defender of the weak, the daughters said. A giver to the needy.
But there was a dark side. Despite a childhood poisoned by his father’s drinking, Havens had followed suit with a life of hard work and hard play.
He decided to build a roadside tavern.
One day, when his wife and daughters were away, an out-of-town woman sat at the bar and ordered a drink. An affair began, the drinking got worse, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye, Havens lost his family.
He got married again, to the woman from the bar, Brenda Havens, and before long, he was drinking around the clock, sinking into what’s known as wet brain, or Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a condition that results from heavy alcohol use and can produce confusion, hallucinations, and problems with memory.
Mutual alcohol use ruined the new marriage, too. Friends and family said Havens was no longer in his right mind.
What exactly happened in January 2007 would always remain uncertain and incomplete, facts cobbled together from police reports, the recollections of friends, and Havens’ foggy memories.
One afternoon, he came home drunk. He recalled a fight, accusations of cowardice. Brenda Havens told her husband to shoot her and then himself. A murder-suicide.
He remembered shooting the gun.
The drinking continued as Havens avoided calls from his relatives, his brother said, and made clumsy efforts to hide what had happened, according to police reports.
Two days later, police performing a wellness check found Havens barely coherent, dressed in a T-shirt and flip-flops in the middle of winter.
The body of Brenda Havens was in the backyard.
Havens admitted he killed his wife. But he pushed back against the claim that he had planned a murder.
There were complicating factors: peculiar evidence of a ricocheting bullet and a jailhouse snitch who traded a reduced sentence for a lie.
In a pretrial hearing, Havens watched as his youngest daughter was grilled by a zealous district attorney. The prospects looked bad. Havens and his daughters were given an hour to consider a final offer.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
Oklahoma’s medical parole law specifies that inmates sentenced to life without the possibility of parole are ineligible for compassionate release.
That put Havens at the cusp of what the law allows; he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Hospital Stays at State Expense
It’s less Havens seeking parole than his daughters. They have guaranteed that they can cover the expenses of their father’s housing if he is released for his final months.
The daughters were reluctant to speak out for this story. They said that Havens had the respect of the prison staff and a spotless record as an inmate, but still they said they feared that he could be persecuted if it became known that he was seeking compassionate release.
Employees of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections are governed by a code of conduct that binds them to respect the dignity of others and prohibits behavior that demeans or disregards their welfare. Code violations can result in suspension, termination, and the imposition of statutory penalties.
Easton offered further details on Havens’ now-decrepit condition.
His medical records are almost 2300 pages long. Prostate cancer was just the beginning; there were problems galore.
Not long ago, Havens was rushed to the emergency room because seven liters of urine had backed up in his bladder.
Havens cannot stand and needs help from his cellmate to use the toilet.
He writhes in pain on the floor of his cell.
Medical Paroles are Not Rising
In 2021, freshman state senator and staunch conservative Jessica Garvin was approached by a liberal group with a plan to revise the state’s outmoded medical parole statute, which provided a simple process of application but zero guidance as to what constituted a chronic illness.
The issue appealed to Garvin because her working life was in long-term care; she was an administrator at West Wind Assisted Living in Marlow and today owns a hospice company, Refuge Care, with clinics in Oklahoma and Texas.
Garvin couldn’t recall the name of the group that approached her with a pre-written bill. Regardless, she said the language was overly generous: for example, granting parole for pregnancy would incentivize behaviors that resulted in pregnancy.
Still, she was interested. Plans to change the law had been failing for nearly a decade, and the group signaled that it would negotiate with the new senator.
Working together, they crafted a new bill.
“That was the beauty of it,” Garvin said. “I don’t think it’s a Democrat versus Republican idea. It’s not sexy, but it’s one that I’m very proud of.”
Once Garvin put the bill forward — SB 320 was one of several medical parole measures to be introduced in 2021, but it was the only bill destined to become law — she confronted the task of convincing her fellow senators to go along with a plan that originally came from a liberal lobbying group.
They said no, at first.
Most of Garvin’s colleagues didn’t have experience in long-term care. Once she painted a picture for them and laid out potential annual cost-burden benefits of hundreds of thousands of dollars, opposition evaporated.
“It was really a no-brainer after that,” Garvin said.
But rather than becoming more common, medical paroles have decreased dramatically since the law went into effect on November 1, 2021, according to data from the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board.
In the three years prior to the law’s passage, 30 medical paroles were granted in Oklahoma; since 2021, there have been only six.
How the Law Works
According to a pamphlet published by Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the new law clarified eligibility but also established a daunting bureaucratic juggernaut.
The process began with a medical parole request filed by the facility medical provider, which was then reviewed by the ODOC chief medical officer, who could approve or deny it.
The application then went to the manager of sentence administration to verify eligibility and was then passed to the warden, who judged whether the individual could pose a threat.
From there, the division manager added to the report and forwarded it to the chief of operations and the chief of staff, while the parole processing unit verified potential home care.
The application then went back to the chief medical officer, and from there to the department of corrections director, who also could approve or deny.
At last, it was presented to the five-member parole board, which could approve with a majority vote. If the inmate was convicted of a violent crime, the governor would be required to sign off as well.
A Little Grace
It may be impossible to determine the reason medical paroles have gone down since the passage of the 2021 law.
Paroles before the change may appear elevated due to releases granted in the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak.
It’s also possible that the more exacting health criteria now required discourages applications.
Or it may be that the tangled bureaucratic process established by the new law presents an unassailable obstacle to inmates who are afflicted with debilitating health issues.
On other fronts, there is reason for hope.
Rindi Citty, an LPN with two decades of experience in home health and hospice care, is on the brink of opening a new health facility specifically designed to provide care for patients who are difficult to place.
House of Grace, licensed for 62 beds, will open its doors in Mooreland on March 7 and operate under a governing principle: your past should not be held against you forever.
The nursing clinic already has a medical parole case scheduled to be admitted.
“We just want to give everybody a little grace,” Citty said.
You Need a Lawyer
What Citty can’t provide is advice about securing medical parole.
Tulsa attorney James Wirth described the exhaustive process in a detailed video available on YouTube.
Wirth did not mince words: Professional assistance would be critical to navigating the hard road to compassionate release.
“If you have somebody that you’re looking to help out, looking to see if this is a possibility, you’re probably going to want legal representation,” Wirth said. “Certainly, you’re going to want an attorney to review it.”
Even with a lawyer, it’s far from easy.
Easton succeeded at last in completing the first step of the nine-step process for Havens, who has months to live.
“I began my communication with DOC on January 2, and received word that the first step was complete on February 17,” Easton said.
Step one took five weeks.
“There are eight more steps,” Easton said.
