The Texas Tribune: Cardiologists Accuse Hospital of Discrimination

 Caleb Bryant Miller for The Texas TribuneDrs. Harish Chandna, from left, Ajay Gaalla, Dakshesh Kumar Parikh, cardiologists, in the waiting room of their office in Victoria.

VICTORIA — The e-mails and memos written by administrators and doctors at Citizens Medical Center here about three of their colleagues of Indian descent are, at best, derogatory. An operating room chief wrote of trying to force “the Indians off the reservation.” Others wrote about their “Indian troubles,” or labeled the hospital’s two rival cardiology practices as “the Cowboys” and “the Indians.”

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At worst, they could be considered racist: “I feel a sense of disgust but am more concerned with what this means to the future of the hospital as more of our Middle-Eastern-born physicians demand leadership roles and demand influence,” David P. Brown, chief executive of Citizens Medical, wrote in a 2007 memo to himself. He continued, “It will change the entire complexion of the hospital and create a level of fear among our employees.”

But whether racial animus led Citizens Medical, a 344-bed county-owned hospital, to close its cardiology unit to non-staff doctors — effectively revoking the privileges of Drs. Harish Chandna, Ajay Gaalla and Dakshesh Kumar Parikh to practice there — is the subject of fierce debate and a discrimination lawsuit filed by the three doctors in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas. The dispute has divided Victoria’s close-knit medical community, where many doctors and hospital officials say it is not about race — the city has long been home to doctors of all ethnicities and nationalities — but a struggle over egos and influence gone awry.

The Citizens Medical battle appears to have begun over operational disagreements between Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh and hospital administrators, and a lack of trust between the three Indian-American doctors and other cardiologists at C.M.C. Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh have their own cardiology practice and have practiced at C.M.C. and the neighboring DeTar Hospital for many years.

In e-mails, memos and court testimony, Citizens Medical administrators and doctors, who declined to be interviewed for this article, describe fractious relationships between themselves and the three cardiologists as they debated on-call schedules, compensation and leadership roles. The arguments sometimes devolved into shouting matches and name-calling — often, C.M.C. officials suggest in the documents, incited by the three cardiologists.

“From my review of the evidence, the common denominator in the rough aspects of the operation of the hospital were the three plaintiffs,” said Rex L. Easley Jr., one of the defense lawyers in the suit.

In e-mails referenced in a complaint the plaintiffs filed in August, Citizens Medical doctors also accuse the three cardiologists of starting a smear campaign against the hospital’s staff heart surgeon, Dr. Yusuke Yahagi, who is of Japanese descent and who complained of harassment and threatened to leave the hospital.

“This seditious speech and subversive actions toward [Dr. Yahagi] and C.M.C. is deliberate and calculated,” Dr. William T. Campbell Jr., a staff cardiologist and one of the defendants in the suit, wrote in a March 2010 e-mail included in the court file connected with the case. He continued, “These rabble-rousing behaviors are very disruptive to general medical care and are a poor reflection on Victoria medical community as a whole.”

But Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh, board-certified cardiologists who have been licensed in Texas for 13 to 18 years, say they were raising concerns about inappropriate procedures and poor patient outcomes, not being “disruptive.” In court filings, the doctors — one who was born in the United States and two who were born in India and are naturalized citizens — say they were consistently treated like second-class citizens, removed from committees and pushed out of laboratory posts arbitrarily, or overlooked in favor of “less-qualified” cardiologists C.M.C. hired.

The Texas Tribune: Lawmakers and Others Discuss Changes to Education Programs for Prisoners

Lawmakers will most likely cut that number significantly in the 2012-13 budget, and that could be just the beginning of big changes to come.

“The structure itself screams out for change, screams out for renovation and innovation,” said State Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

The Windham School District is financed by the Texas Education Agency and overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In the 2009-10 school year, about 77,500 offenders participated in some type of Windham program. The school district operates much like a regular public school system, with a superintendent, principals and teachers at campuses across the state. It provides basic adult education, vocational training, life-skills programs and college-level courses.

Despite its sizable budget, a staff of more than 1,200 and a large number of students, Windham awarded just 5,287 G.E.D.’s in the last school year. “It’s really outrageous,” said Senator John Whitmire, Democrat of Houston and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

Texas could save money, and prisoners could get better educations, some lawmakers say, if programs were provided online. Such programs allow students to learn at their own pace, Ms. Shapiro said, and would be better for prisoners. “Putting them in desks and chairs and making them feel like they’re in a school surrounding makes them feel stupid,” she said.

Lawmakers also complain that the school system seems top-heavy, with some 60 principals. “It’s the structure that needs to change,” Ms. Shapiro said. She and Mr. Whitmire are calling for a review of the program.

But correctional-education experts say lawmakers’ ideas, particularly about online programs, show a lack of understanding about prison life. “I don’t know of a program anywhere in the country where they’re able to use the Internet for instructional purposes,” said Chris Tracy, a former Windham superintendent. “Security personnel,” he said, are “absolutely paranoid about Internet systems.”

Mr. Tracy said that using more technology would not replace teaching staff for a population in which learning disabilities are endemic and educational achievement is low. “You don’t just say: ‘Here’s a computer. Help yourself learn how to read and write,’ ” he said.

Eddy Turner, a Windham teacher, said the school district could use more technology and could probably do with fewer administrators. But he said lawmakers should not judge the success of Windham solely on outcomes like G.E.D. attainment. Mr. Turner teaches courses that help inmates develop skills like maintaining relationships, balancing a checkbook and keeping a job.

“If you take education out of the prison,” Mr. Turner said, “they will no longer be confronted about changing.”

The Texas Tribune: 30-Year-Old Capital Case Returns to Court, With Defense Alleging Bias

The United States Supreme Court overturned Mr. Banks’s death sentence in 2004, finding that the Bowie County prosecutors who tried the case suppressed evidence and deliberately covered their mistakes for decades.

“It’s really a remarkable tale of misconduct — just about every kind of thing the prosecution could do that was improper,” said Robert C. Owen, co-director of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law, who was one of Mr. Banks’s appellate lawyers.

Now, the same district attorney’s office — including one of the same prosecutors who was involved in the original trial — is again seeking the death penalty for Mr. Banks. Despite the Supreme Court’s rebuke, James Elliott, who has been a prosecutor on the case for more than 30 years, has maintained that he will pursue Mr. Banks until he “gets what he deserves.”

At a hearing Monday in a Bowie County state district court, Mr. Banks’s lawyers will ask Judge Nathan E. White to disqualify Mr. Elliott and the local district attorney’s office from the case and to assign different lawyers to represent the state.

“Mr. Elliott’s misbehavior proves that he cannot serve as a disinterested prosecutor and is laboring under a conflict of interest that will prevent Mr. Banks from receiving a fair trial,” lawyers wrote in court documents.

Mr. Banks, who is black and was 21 when the crime was committed, was convicted of killing Mr. Whitehead, who was white, so he could take off with his car. The police found Mr. Whitehead’s body in a park near Texarkana and soon discovered that Mr. Banks had been with him on the last night he was seen alive.

There were no witnesses to the killing and no physical evidence linking Mr. Banks to it. The prosecution’s case relied largely on the testimony of Robert Farr and Charles Cook, both admitted drug users; Mr. Cook also had convictions for robbery by assault and forgery.

Mr. Cook told the jury that he met Mr. Banks in Dallas the morning after the murder. He said Mr. Banks had blood on his pants and told him he decided to “kill the white boy for the hell of it and take his car and come to Dallas.”

Mr. Farr testified that he, Mr. Banks and another man drove to Dallas on the day that Mr. Banks was arrested so Mr. Banks could retrieve a gun to use in armed robberies. Mr. Farr said Mr. Banks told him he would “take care of it” if any trouble arose.

Mr. Banks had no criminal history, and people who were with him and Mr. Whitehead on the last night that Mr. Whitehead was alive testified there was no ill will between the two. Nonetheless, an all-white Bowie County jury convicted Mr. Banks, who was sentenced to death.

In 1999 — almost 20 years after the trial — a federal judge forced Bowie County to open its case records, and Mr. Banks’s lawyers discovered a transcript showing that Mr. Cook’s testimony had been extensively rehearsed and coached. They also learned that the police had paid Mr. Farr, an informant who had an unreliable record, $200 for his role in the investigation.

Mr. Farr, in an affidavit, said he was afraid that the police would arrest him on drug charges. In exchange for the money, and to avoid jail, he agreed to set up Mr. Banks, he said, persuading him to drive to Dallas to get a gun.

Prosecutors allowed Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr to lie in court and never told jurors that their information was false, the Supreme Court found. Mr. Cook denied on the stand that anyone had helped him with his testimony, and Mr. Farr said he had not been paid for his help in the case. During closing arguments, Mr. Elliott told jurors that they should believe Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr.

In arguments before the Supreme Court, state lawyers did not dispute that Mr. Cook had been coached and that Mr. Farr was paid for his help. But they said Mr. Banks’s lawyers were at fault for not uncovering the information sooner.

The Supreme Court ruled that without the testimony of Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr, Mr. Banks might not have been sentenced to death. “It has long been established that the prosecution’s ‘deliberate deception of a court and jurors by the presentation of known false evidence is incompatible with rudimentary demands of justice,’?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

Mr. Elliott declined to comment last week about the case. “We’re in litigation,” he said. “The newspaper is the wrong place to be trying cases — it just is. So I can’t give any comment.”