Prisoner With AIDS Will Go Home to Die

One day next week, Judy Cagle will be free to go home to die.

You may recall her story, told here just one month ago. Cagle is 37 years old and dying of AIDS. Her doctors say she may have as few as three, perhaps as many as five, months to live.

For the last three years, she has been in the California Institute for Women in Frontera, where she has been serving a 14-year sentence for armed robberies in which no one was injured. Since last summer, she has been confined in a locked ward at Ontario Community Hospital, where inmates are sent when their health becomes too precarious to allow them to remain in Frontera’s AIDS unit.

By her own account, Cagle was a heroin addict by the time she was 13. A year later, she became a prostitute to support her habit. In the ensuing years, she bore a healthy son, committed nonviolent crimes, went to prison, committed more crimes, attempted suicide and contracted AIDS.

Alone, terrified and bewildered by her illness, Cagle went on a drug binge and, when the drugs ran out, on a brief spree of armed robberies. Caught and sent to Patton State Hospital, she not only kicked her addiction but was held up to other prisoners as a model of rehabilitation. She became a published poet and diarist and made videos warning others against the dangers of drug abuse and sexually transmitted diseases.

Under California law, dying prisoners can petition for compassionate release. Their requests must be approved by the director of corrections and the judge who sentenced them. A year ago, Cagle applied and was turned down. Four months ago, AIDS Project Los Angeles asked Santa Monica attorney Viki I. Podberesky to press for reconsideration. She agreed to do so without fee, and, at her urging, the department relented.

Last week, Podberesky took her client’s case to Superior Court Judge Richard Arnason, the Contra Costa County jurist who had sentenced Cagle. “Judy Cagle is asking you to help her in her battle,” Podberesky argued, “and to let her die with dignity.”

The district attorney’s office opposed Cagle’s request. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Clark described her as a “manipulative drug addict” who brought AIDS “on herself.”

Clark’s boss, Contra Costa Dist. Atty. Gary Yancey, was more pointed when he spoke to me Monday: “A hype is a hype. . . . My position is that with her record of drug addiction and prostitution, there is no question that the public safety issues must prevail.”

However sick she might be, Yancey said, Cagle was bound to return to prostitution and needle sharing. The Department of Corrections, he said, was “trying to dump” its terminally ill inmates on county authorities. Outside prison, Yancey insisted, such people would consume resources that ought to be reserved for those who had “contracted AIDS through no fault of their own.”

Told that Cagle has been promised care in private facilities and will be no burden to the public sector, Yancey said: “I don’t believe it.”

A few hours later, Arnason, who does not talk to journalists, ordered Cagle’s release. She must file regular reports on her health and whereabouts; she is forbidden to make any financial claim on the public sector. But as soon as paperwork is completed, she will be set free.

“I’m not in the business of second-guessing judges’ orders,” Yancey subsequently told me. “But Judy Cagle hasn’t paid her debt to society, and I still think she’s a danger to other people. I hope Arnason is right, but I’m cynical. I’ve heard so many stories. We’ll see.”

At this moment, there are 786 men and women state prisoners who have tested HIV-positive. Many are serving relatively short sentences for nonviolent crimes. Their numbers have grown by 212% over the last four years, and some authorities believe as many as 5,000 prisoners now carry the virus. Last year, the state Department of Corrections approved just 12 compassionate releases; most of the prisoners died within days of release.

Earlier this year, the Legislature passed and sent to Gov. Pete Wilson a bill introduced by State Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) that would have streamlined the compassionate release procedure. Under its provisions, any request unresolved by the Department of Corrections within 15 days would be returned to the sentencing judge for action.

The measure was widely supported by clergy and correctional experts, and was endorsed by Mother Teresa. “I appeal to you, Gov. Wilson, in the name of God and with all the strength at my command,” she wrote, “to sign this bill.

“Please.”

Wilson vetoed it.

Judy Cagle is fortunate. Her claims of rehabilitation have received extraordinary support from medical and prison authorities who know her. In Viki Podberesky she found a selfless and able legal advocate. In Richard Arnason, she found an independent jurist willing to follow his conscience and the law despite the pressure of a politically influential prosecutor.

Many others will not be so fortunate.

To be a drug addict--as Judy Cagle and many others suffering in our prisons’ AIDS wards have been for most of their lives--is to live in unspeakable darkness, where pain and the fear of pain cast a chill too deep for words. In such darkness, the cold wind seems to come from all directions at once. There--not quite dead and not quite alive--a person no longer remembers which hurts were inflicted by others and which they inflicted on themselves.

But if you are lucky and if you are strong, sometimes a narrow avenue opens to the light. In death’s very shadow, Judy Cagle was strong enough to find within herself a kind of courage no one else would have guessed there; later, she was lucky enough to find friends to help.

However many days are left, Judy Cagle will live them in the light of the warm sun that, one day, will shine as brightly on all our graves.