Dying ex-con: Prison's health care system failed
LANSING -- Lloyd Martell knows he soon will be dead from the colon cancer that has spread to his lymph nodes and lungs.
What bothers him is he could have gotten treatment that may have saved his life if a prison doctor had told him the polyp removed from his colon in December 2004 was cancerous.
At 41, he still could look forward to a full life, still could watch his two sons, ages 6 and 7, grow up.
"I'm at peace now," Martell said Thursday at a Lansing press conference preceding a hearing on prison health care. "I'm just trying to save the next guy."
Martell, serving one to four years for fleeing Detroit-area police, who tried to stop him while he was driving on a suspended license, asked a prison doctor to remove what he thought was a hemorrhoid.
Dr. Jerome Wisneski, a Grand Rapids resident who works in Duane Waters Hospital inside the Jackson prison complex, removed the growth, assured him it was a benign polyp and sent him back to his cell, Martell said.
Eleven months later, in November 2005, Martell began bleeding from his rectum and was admitted to Jackson's Foote Hospital. That's when a doctor showed him a pathology report written when the polyp was removed nearly a year earlier.
"She told me it was stage-four colon cancer," Martell said. "I had 20 months to live. My life changed dramatically at that moment. That's when I realized I was facing a death sentence for fleeing and eluding."
In August, Martell was granted a medical parole and sent home to die. Had he been told the polyp was cancerous in December 2004, he could have gotten chemotherapy and prevented its spread, he believes.
"All he (Dr. Wisneski) had to do was tell me," Martell told a room filled with prisoner rights advocates and inmates' family members. "I'm dealing with the inevitable.
"Even after I'm gone, please don't stop, because people are dying in there every day."
Wisneski still works in the Jackson prison hospital for Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the for-profit company under contract with the state to provide medical care for prison inmates. He did not return calls for comment.
State records show Wisneski's license to practice medicine was suspended in 1979 after he was charged in Grand Rapids with delivery of a controlled substance. His license was reinstated in 1981 after the Michigan Court of Appeals threw out the case, ruling he was illegally entrapped.
Under its contract with the state, CMS was required to employ a number of doctors who previously worked for the Corrections Department, company spokesman Ken Fields said.
As for Wisneski, "for the past 25 years, he has maintained a full and unrestricted license in Michigan," Fields said.
Martell was among a score of former inmates, family members and others who spoke during the press conference and hearing, delivering a litany of complaints about inadequate health care in the prisons.
Dr. Allen Price, a retired physician who worked for five years in the Jackson prisons, claimed care declined after CMS took over.
"Setting up roadblock after roadblock is the modus operandi of Correctional Medical Services," he said.
Fields, the CMS spokesman, said the company has increased staffing since taking over prisoner care and has "developed extensive relationships with specialty providers and medical experts" near the prisons.
Prison Legal Services and the American Friends Service Committee, two nonprofit groups that advocate prisoners rights, arranged the hearing. Gov. Jennifer Granholm's staff and all members of the Legislature were invited to attend, an organizer said, but only two legislative staff members showed up.
In August, after the death of 21-year-old inmate Timothy Joe Souders, Granholm ordered an independent investigation of health care in the prisons, but that inquiry has not begun.
Souders' death, documented in surveillance video showing him shackled to a cement table for most of four days, prompted U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen this week to reopen the mental health portion of a long-running lawsuit over the care of inmates. Enslen also ordered the Corrections Department to stop using four-point restraints to punish prisoners.
For 20 days after Souders' death, corrections officials claimed he died in his sleep, his mother, Theresa Vaughn, said at Thursday's hearing.
"I know Timothy's ordeal is not an isolated incident, as the Department of Corrections would have us believe," she said. "There is nothing the State of Michigan can do to bring my son back. I am what I am, and that is a mother who has lost a child.
"I'm here to make sure no other family has to suffer the losses we have suffered or go through what we had to go through."
Send e-mail to the author: pshellenbarger@grpress.com