NEW YORK - James Hill often told his family he just wanted to live moment to moment, like a Buddhist monk. He said it was the only way to survive 14 years in prison after being given a sentence he believed was unjust. But as his release date neared this spring, his nieces and nephews started encouraging their 72-year-old “Uncle Jim” to start thinking about the future.
When David and his sister arrived in the heavily guarded visitation room at Rivers Federal Correctional Institute in North Carolina in December last year to see their uncle for the first time since his imprisonment, they were told that no touching was allowed. An ICE spokeswoman said an order to transfer Jim to immigration officials, known as a “detainer,” was issued in his case in 2017 and a copy of those orders are provided to federal inmates.
Jim, who had been in Canada, came back to turn himself in, thinking it was all a misunderstanding that would soon be resolved, according to his family members and letters he wrote at the time. He said his only goal was to ease his patients’ pain. His attorneys planned to introduce expert testimony that would say his prescriptions were medically appropriate and that he couldn’t be held responsible for patients’ abuse of narcotics, court documents showed.
“I am being depicted in the local newspapers and television as a despicable common criminal and yet believe it or not, I feel blessed,” he said in the letter to Jess. “Within each shell of anxiety and discord there is a seed of peace and grace,” he wrote, signing off, “May the true spirit of Christmas penetrate your bones ... and warm you from within when the world is cold.”
After he said he had been transferred to a different federal prison, he wrote Jess again in May 2007: “The food here is disgusting,” complaining of a serious salmonella outbreak. “A food worker told me the fish patties served are labeled ‘not for human consumption.’ It is apparently used to feed dolphins who are trained by the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf to hunt for sea mines.
By the time he was transferred to the Farmville immigrant detention center in mid-April, the protocol was to quarantine him for 14 days. According to ICE guidance issued on April 10, all new detainees were supposed to be evaluated to see if they were at higher risk for serious illness from COVID-19, including if they were 65 or older. The ICE spokeswoman didn’t respond to a question about whether Jim was evaluated and said only that he was subject to mandatory detention.
This is tragic and was completely preventable
How easily can someone become caught up in an unforgiving society that had a health system peddling narcotics.
You picked a pretty awful man to write this story about. Multiple kids with multiple former wives and 80 counts of dealing narcotics with a death by overdose on his hands and 32 counts of medical insurance fraud, and those are just the ones prosecutors have proof. He was guilty.
Slow news day?
Why am not caring
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