Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Dangerous Court Nominee

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted May 22, 2008.

In 2004, Estelle Richardson’s lifeless and battered body was found on the floor of a Corrections Corp. of America prison cell. Four years later, that unsolved homicide has come back to haunt Republican stalwart "Gus" Puryear, the nation’s top private prison litigator and Bush nominee for US District Court. We talk to journalist Silja Talvi. [Read AlterNet's two-part investigative series this interview is based on by Talvi]

Amy Goodman: We turn now to an unfolding controversy over a Bush administration nominee for the federal bench. Just under a year ago, President Bush nominated Gus Puryear to serve on the US District Court in Tennessee's Middle District. Puryear is a Nashville attorney and general counsel for the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the United States. If he's approved, Puryear would be presiding over the same district where the CCA's headquarters are based.

Puryear is now coming under new scrutiny for his role in the CCA's handling of a prisoner death at its Nashville jail. The victim, thirty-four-year-old Estelle Richardson, was found dead with a cracked skull, four broken ribs in her solitary confinement cell. Four guards were implicated in what was later ruled a homicide.

The CCA eventually settled out of court with Richardson's family. No charges were filed against the guards. But a major new investigative piece on the website Alternet.org says Richardson's death could come back to haunt Puryear's nomination for the federal bench.

Silja Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times and author of the book Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the US Prison System. Her latest article, "Meet Gus Puryear," is online in two parts at Alternet.org. Silja joins us from Seattle, Washington. ... Tell us about Gus Puryear.

Talvi: … Gus Puryear's story wouldn't have been of particular interest for me or to me, had it not been for the fact that I had been following Estelle Richardson's case for years. I first came across a brief blurb about her murder back in -- well, it was four years ago -- and wanted to do something to include her story in my book. I had a gut instinct that something terrible had happened to this woman. I tried to track her story over the years and could get very little by way of any information. And very suddenly, in an unusual way, some of this information started to fall into place, and it happened to revolve around this man, Gus Puryear, and his bid for this federal judgeship.

So, he is, as you rightly point out, up for a lifetime appointment. He was nominated last year. And if appointed, that would indeed be for life. And one of the things that people have been bringing up, and rightly so, is that as a thirty-nine-year-old, he's only brought one federal case to trial so far. So with a real paltry legal background, there's already the question of, why is he even nominated in the first place? And once some of this stuff started to come up around what he had actually done or has done as general counsel for CCA, that's really gotten a lot of organizations involved in opposing his nomination.

Goodman: So tell us, in this case of Estelle Richardson, first focusing specifically, then we'll go larger with Corrections Corporation of America, explain what happened to her and explain what Gus Puryear had to do with it.

Talvi: She was in the process of trying to find herself in a better place in her life, she headed from Michigan to Tennessee in 1999, and she was actually going down there initially to be a surgical assistant. She was looking for a better life for herself and for her two children. As single mom, she had really been trapped in a very, very low-income, dead-end job as a telemarketer. And so, she headed down there.

Unfortunately, she found that the job opportunities weren't what she had expected. The school opportunities weren't what she expected. And she started hustling, like a lot of women do on low end, basically selling prescription pills. Initially she was just acquiring those prescription pills, then she got hooked on them. And she was first picked up around 2001, 2002, and was given a suspended sentence. Unfortunately, her UA subsequently came up dirty. And then she actually was found guilty of food stamp fraud.

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Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

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