Michael L. Owens
Bristol Herald Courier, Va.
(MCT)
ABINGDON, Va.— The mother of a murdered inmate at Red Onion State Prison has lost her $95 million wrongful-death lawsuit after a federal judge ruled there is not enough evidence to prove prison officials allowed the attack to happen.
U.S. District Judge James P. Jones, in an opinion posted Monday, ruled in favor of the 15 prison officials and guards accused of allowing the 2010 strangulation of Aaron A. Cooper on the recreation yard of the supermax facility in Pound.
“There is no doubt that prison inmates are owned a duty of protection by their keepers under the Constitution and it is exceedingly distressing that Gleason was able to senselessly murder two fellow inmates, one after the other,” Jones wrote. “Neverthless … I cannot find that any of the individual prison officials and employees sued here are legally culpable for Cooper’s death.”
The mother, Kim Strickland, plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals, said her attorney, Mary Lynn Tate of Abingdon.
“Miss Strickland believes there was sufficient evidence-of-fact issues that would justify and require a trial,” Tate said Tuesday.
The killer, Robert C. Gleason Jr., died in the electric chair last January for strangling cellmate Harvey Watson, 63, in 2009 while at Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap and then for Cooper.
Gleason, 42, initially was serving a life sentence without parole for shooting a man to death in Amherst County. After strangling Watson, he warned prison officials, court prosecutors and newspaper reporters that he would kill again unless put to death.
At Red Onion, he strangled Cooper with a braided bed sheet that had been threaded through the chain-link wall shared by their individual recreation cages. Gleason coaxed the noose around Cooper’s neck by convincing him it was all part of a lawsuit against the prison and that he would survive, show prison interrogation videos.
A Bristol Herald Courier review of the grainy, black-and-white surveillance tape that captured the murder seems to show that Gleason had plenty of time to tug on the noose, let go to pace his cage for several minutes, and return to tug some more on the noose.
In all, an hour and 15 minutes passed between the time guards escorted Cooper into a cage next to Gleason and when the murder was discovered.
Gleason told the Herald Courier that he arranged the murder by trading favors with guards to forgo a strip search so he could sneak in the noose. Guards also let the inmates pick their cages, he said, allowing him access to Cooper.
“Some of that evidence involves contradictions between Gleason and the guards about how much the guards actually knew,” Tate said Tuesday. “And we believe that’s a jury issue.
A week-long jury trial had been set for mid-April in U.S. District Court in Big Stone Gap, but it was cancelled Monday, when Jones ruled there is no evidence showing the guards were indifferent to Cooper’s safety, which is the legal hurdle needed to launch a trial.
“The defendants could not have known that their alleged conduct and the trading that facilitated it was inappropriate in light of any risk to Cooper in the recreation cage,” Jones wrote. “At most, the plaintiff’s evidence demonstrates that some of the defendants may have been negligent, a standard that is insufficient to support this cause of action [lawsuit].”