Meet Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Villainous Nominee for a Lifetime Judgeship

By Silja J.A. Talvi, AlterNet. Posted May 5, 2008.

Editor's Note: 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 U.S. District Court. This is Part I of an AlterNet exclusive, two-part investigative feature by Silja J.A. Talvi.

Part 1: Mr. Puryear, meet Ms. Richardson

It's hard to say what Estelle Ann Richardson would have thought if she would have had the chance to meet the man who authorized a hefty settlement check for her children.

Maybe she would have noticed that he moved in the world like someone who was used to things going his way, that he had a lot of money, or that he looked a lot younger and more relaxed than most of his corporate peers. It's hard to say, because she never had the chance to be introduced to the harmless-enough looking man possessed of a rather ostentatious name: Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV.

The 39-year-old lawyer, awaiting a lifetime appointment as a judge in U.S. District Court, prefers to be called "Gus."

By all accounts, Gus is a charismatic, outgoing guy who likes to spend time with his family. He volunteers as a deacon in the Presbyterian Church and serves as a board member of the Exchange Club of Nashville, Tenn., where one of his responsibilities is to organize the annual Antiques and Garden Show. From a corporate standpoint, Puryear has excelled in his job as general counsel for Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), the nation's largest and most influential private prison company. Under his direction, CCA's in-house attorneys work with a stable of contracted law firms to handle corporate legal matters of all kinds, not the least of which are the hundreds of claims and lawsuits filed against the company at any given time. A smart, enthusiastic GOP stalwart, Puryear is the kind of guy the party wants around. It doesn't hurt that he's also very, very rich: Between his bank account, assets and unexercised CCA shares, he's worth about $13 million, give or take a few thousand.

On the other hand, Richardson, a low-income, African American mother of two, moved through a world quite removed from that of the upper-echelon neighborhoods, schools and workplaces that afford Puryear his comfort zone. It's unlikely that the two would have ever met under even the most random of circumstances. The exclusive, members-only Belle Meade Country Club to which Puryear belongs, for instance, wouldn't have been the kind of place Richardson would have set foot in, particularly considering that African Americans weren't even allowed to join until 1994. (To this day, the only black member lives out of state. To boot, none of the women who have been admitted to the club, called "lady members," hold voting privileges.)

Belle Meade country clubbers probably raised a glass to toast Puryear when President Bush nominated him to sit on the federal bench in the Middle District of Tennessee. Yet, instead of breezing through what should have been an easy, perfunctory hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this past February, Puryear was confronted with a series of uncomfortable questions about his legal and professional qualifications for the bench.

Nothing about Puryear's hobnobbing, rapid ascent to the status of a GOP darling suggested the emergence of an ad-hoc, grassroots movement to derail his nomination, much less the methodical persistence of a former CCA prisoner-turned-jailhouse lawyer hell bent on exposing the judicial candidate's affiliations, biases, and lack of courtroom experience. What Richardson's story has to do with all of this isn't obvious on the face of it, but the connection between the two has bubbled to the surface amidst a strange series of post-nomination twists and turns that no one, including Puryear, could have seen coming.

A mysterious homicide

On July 5, 2004, Richardson's lifeless, 34-year-old body was found slumped on the floor of an isolation cell in a Corrections Corp. of America (CCA)-operated detention facility in Nashville. An autopsy revealed that she died as a result of massive blunt force injuries to the head, resulting in a cracked skull. Richardson also had four broken ribs and serious internal organ injuries. Dr. Bruce Levy, Tennessee's chief medical examiner, ruled that Richardson's death was a homicide. His autopsy revealed a set of injuries that were consistent with a "deceleration injury," meaning that her head and body slammed simultaneously toward a hard surface, such as a wall or a floor.

In an interview with the Tennessean in September 2004, Dr. Levy emphasized that Richardson's injuries could not have been the result of a fall or suicide. Richardson, as he pointed out, was in a highly restricted segregation unit, which allowed no freedom of movement outside of her small, one-woman cell, much less contact with other prisoners. "It's a restricted area," he said. "There's a limit to what you can do. If she had fallen from a high window or if she had been hit by a car, I would expect to see these types of injuries."

See more stories tagged with: gus puryear, cca, estelle richardson

Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

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