The daughters have had enough.
When Oklahoma Watch first chronicled the fraught medical parole odyssey of James Havens in March, Havens’ daughters, Jeni Maus and Jessica Dougherty, both of California, preferred to remain in the background, hiring Oklahoma City attorney Aaron Easton to begin the arduous process of seeking parole for their incarcerated father, dying of prostate cancer.
The daughters are not in the background anymore.
After Havens’ application for parole was denied — the first step of a nine-step process took six weeks to complete, then the final eight steps were squeezed into three days between two contentious court hearings — Maus and Dougherty emerged from the shadows to fight for their father.
That struggle has been characterized by resistance from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which has failed to comply with recent changes to the spirit and letter of medical parole legislation, the daughters and Havens’ attorneys said.
Furthermore, recent orders from the Cleveland County District Court and a unanimous order from the Oklahoma Supreme Court highlight irregularities in ODOC’s treatment of Mr. Havens’ case, which may leave Oklahoma taxpayers on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees.
“We’re not just fighting for our dad, we’re fighting against a system that treats people like numbers instead of human beings,” Maus said. “Every day they ignore the laws that were put into place is another day the system fails all of us. Our dad has followed every rule, met every requirement. How do you keep faith in a system that ignores its own laws?”
The Staggering Costs of Hospitalization
In 2008, Havens killed his second wife, Brenda Havens, in a drunken haze. Brenda Havens was not the mother of the daughters now fighting to save their father, and James Havens promptly pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of life with the possibility of parole.
In 2021, to save taxpayer money and show mercy to inmates who had little time left to live and posed no risk to others, legislators revised Oklahoma’s medical parole law to make compassionate release easier to achieve.
For reasons that remain unclear, the revised law backfired; the number of successful medical parole applications has fallen since 2021.
The new law prevents inmates sentenced to life without the possibility of parole from seeking compassionate release, but permits inmates such as Havens, sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, to apply.
The law says nothing about favoring inmates convicted of lesser crimes.
Brenda Havens’ family is not in favor of parole for James Havens, said the victim’s niece, Kambra Walker.
“He made the choice to take a life, and that choice carries consequences,” Walker said, in a text message. “Granting him medical parole would send the message that her life — and our pain — do not matter. While he seeks release, we continue to serve the sentence he gave us.”
Havens has been a model prisoner for 18 years, his daughters said.
His lawyers question the integrity of the medical parole process.
“As of today, the Department of Corrections has not made an earnest attempt to evaluate Mr. Havens,” said Christopher Garinger, an attorney who has been assisting on Havens’ case since March. “From a commonsense standpoint, they didn’t give him a fair shot.”
In addition to denying Havens’ parole application without explanation and in defiance of the recommendation of his attending physician, ODOC has fought to keep Havens in prison despite the staggering costs of at least three months of hospitalization at taxpayer expense, Garinger said.
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, an average hospital room in Oklahoma runs $2,500 per day, suggesting that the added costs of Havens’ incarceration since January total more than $225,000.
Havens’ daughters have agreed to cover all costs for Havens’ final months if he is granted parole.
“Our father meets every requirement and was approved by both his doctor and the warden, yet he was still denied,” Maus said.
Attorney: “ODOC Does Not Have a Valid Case”
Garinger claimed that since March, ODOC has engaged in tactics to prevent Havens from meeting with his attorneys, manufacturing mysterious trips to private hospitals and ordering unnecessary medical procedures to create conflicts with scheduled meetings.
“Only with a court order with the threat of sanctions did they finally provide us with the ability to meet with our client,” Garinger said.
ODOC refused to discuss Havens’ case with Oklahoma Watch.
Havens’ attorneys learned that their client might have been denied his constitutional right to food and water; they sought a temporary protective order against ODOC, which was granted by Cleveland County District Court Judge Jeff Virgin.
The order required ODOC to ensure that Havens was provided with adequate nutrition, hydration, and medical care.
ODOC responded with a filing to the Oklahoma Supreme Court known as an extraordinary writ, or a writ of prohibition, to challenge Judge Virgin’s authority in the case.
On June 23, after a flurry of briefings, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a unanimous order refusing to assume original jurisdiction in Havens’ case.
“More or less what they are saying is that ODOC does not have a valid case,” Garinger said.
Four days later, on June 27, Judge Virgin denied an outstanding ODOC motion to dismiss and granted Havens’ request for a writ of mandamus, signaling that ODOC should have begun Mr. Havens’ parole process much earlier.
Judge Virgin ruled that Havens could submit a request for attorneys’ fees, which could total as much as $40,000, Garinger said. However, Oklahoma law provided no legal instrument that would require ODOC to restart or reconsider Mr. Havens’ parole application.
“There’s no appeal process,” Garinger said. “There’s no formalized mechanism to initiate the process, to ensure they are going through the steps they are supposed to be doing, or to appeal an adverse decision.”
The Daughters Have Not Given Up
Garinger could only speculate as to ODOC’s motives.
“I think that the Department of Corrections has dug their heels in to such an extent in this particular case that they’ve lost sight of the human being on the other end of this medical parole process,” Garinger said. “To them, it’s become extremely procedural and personal, and at this point, they have not allowed themselves to give Mr. Havens a fair assessment, as is required under law.”
Havens’ daughters refuse to give up.
“Our dad took a plea to save the state of Oklahoma the cost of a trial,” Jessica Dougherty said in an email. “He has served his time graciously. We, his family, have respected ODOC policies and the rules of his incarceration for the last 18 years. We are asking ODOC to have faith in their own system, to respect their own rules and the constituents they serve. Release a dying man to live his last days at the expense of his daughters, not the taxpayers of Oklahoma.”
