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| Va. inmate seeks pardon |
| By timesdispatch.com - Frank Green |
| Published: 08/15/2011 |
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The high-tech pump that keeps Jason C. Smallwood's failing heart running is the same model implanted last year in former Vice President Dick Cheney. Smallwood, however, is a Virginia prison inmate serving 11 years for drug convictions. Prisoners have a constitutional right to adequate health care, and since 2009, surgeons at the VCU Medical Center have twice implanted the left ventricle assist device, or LVAD, in Smallwood's chest. "Without it, I pretty much wouldn't be here," said Smallwood, a healthy-looking, 6-foot-1, 27-year-old Portsmouth native who is serving his sentence at the Powhatan Correctional Center. Locked up since 2007, Smallwood is not due to be released until 2017, but he is asking Gov. Bob McDonnell to grant a conditional pardon so he can be closer to the hospital and in his family's care. The corrections department now budgets $150 million a year for inmate health care, or roughly $4,800 a year per inmate, though Smallwood's expenses are much higher. He is held at the prison's infirmary, where he remains tethered at all times to either a portable computer and batteries or a base module to power and monitor the pump via a line running into his abdomen. Though he and his family have asked, he is not on the heart-transplant waiting list and now says he is not sure he wants to be. The Virginia Department of Corrections does not comment on the health problems of individual inmates but said there has been only one prisoner in the 31,000-inmate system who has ever received an LVAD. Read More. |
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