HOT SPRINGS — A federal jury went home Friday evening without deciding whether six Garland County sheriff’s office employees are responsible for the brain damage an inmate suffered after slipping into a druginduced coma in 2007.
The jury was considering claims that five jailers and a nurse knew how serious Steven McFarland’s medical needs were and purposefully denied him care in violation of his civil rights.
After four hours of deliberations, the jury told U.S. District Court Judge Robert T. Dawson that they wanted to return for deliberations this morning.
McFarland, an Iraq War veteran, was arrested on traffic charges in February 2007 after running a truck off the road.
With muscle relaxers, painkillers and other drugs in his system, the Arkansas National Guardsman went to sleep in a jail cell. He suffered such severe brain damage that he is now mostly bed-bound and dependent on his mother for everything.
In a diaper and a wheelchair designed to support his crippled body, McFarland, now 25, appeared briefly before the jury on the first day of the civil trial Tuesday.
The jury heard his moans and saw his mother, Jan McRaven, cry.
McRaven, a nurse, gave tearful testimony about the difficulty of caring for her son. She sued on his behalf 2 1 /2 years ago.
The jailers and nurse argued that they didn’t know McFarland was overdosing on drugs.
They would have sent him to the hospital if he had asked, Ralph Ohm, their attorney, told the jury.
“There was only one person on this planet who knew Steven McFarland overdosed on drugs on Feb. 13, 2007,” and that was McFarland, Ohm said.
McFarland’s attorneys tried to prove that the jail staff acted with deliberate indifference by not sending him to the hospital and not performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation later when he was found in distress.
“They chose to do nothing,” McFarland’s attorney Morgan “Chip” Welch told the jury at the end of a four-day trial.
Ohm said CPR may have been “preferred,” and he acknowledged that there were missteps throughout the day on behalf of the jail staff. But he argued that none of the missteps were purposeful and in violation of McFarland’s constitutional rights.
A jail supervisor, retired Lt. Judy McMurrian, suggested sending McFarland to the hospital when she learned that 21 pills were missing from a bottle of muscle relaxers. Jailer Ronald Radley suggested having the nurse examine him instead.
But no one told former jail nurse Tommy Harmon that McFarland was thought to have ingested drugs, according to testimony. And Harmon concluded that McFarland was just showing “alcohol symptoms.”
So McFarland went to sleep in the “drunk tank.”
No one went into the cell to check on him until five hours later when another inmate found that McFarland had stopped breathing and was foaming at the mouth, a jail cell recording shows.
Jailer Donald Ansley then checked on McFarland and called for an ambulance, but Ansley never performed CPR despite having the training.
Welch, a Little Rock attorney, argued that the seven minutes that passed between the time McFarland was found not breathing and when paramedics arrived were critical.
If someone had gotten some oxygen flowing by performing CPR, McFarland’s brain injury could have been lessened, he argued, relying on the testimony of medical experts.
However, a Hot Springs emergency-medicine doctor told the jury that CPR is “worthless” and wouldn’t have made a difference.
“I do not believe it would have altered his ... outcome,” Dr. James Tutton said. He was the defense’s only witness.
The result is that a 25-yearold who can’t talk has a variety of debilitating and painful complications associated with his brain damage and sedentary state, the jury learned.
In addition to McMurrian, Harmon, Radley and Ansley, jailers J.D. Henry and John T. Dodge are defendants in the case.
Deliberations are to begin today at 9 a.m.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/05/2009