Cabral aide defends ouster of nurse who was FBI informant

Suffolk Sheriff Andrea J. Cabral's chief of staff testified yesterday that a nurse who told the FBI an inmate may have been assaulted by a correctional officer violated the department's code of conduct because she didn't first file a written report about the alleged abuse with the sheriff's office.

''It didn't matter to me that she called the FBI," Cabral's chief, Elizabeth Keeley, told jurors yesterday during a federal civil trial.

But Keeley said she found it ''very egregious and very troubling" that nurse Sheila Porter didn't immediately document her observations about the inmate's injuries in his medical file or file a written report about his allegations of abuse with sheriff's investigators.

Although Porter had immediately notified her supervisor in person about the allegations, Keeley said an oral report was insufficient because, ''if it is not written down, there is no record of it having occurred."

Keeley was called to the stand in the second day of testimony in Porter's $2 million civil suit against Cabral and the Sheriff's Department in US District Court.

Porter, who was employed by a private contractor and worked at the House of Correction for nine years, says Cabral barred her from the facility in June 2003 because she spoke to the FBI. She had been working as an FBI informant, providing information about allegations of inmate abuse by guards, since 1999. Cabral, who is expected to testify later, denies Porter was barred for talking to the FBI.

After Porter was barred, Keeley testified yesterday, US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Kenneth Kaiser, the special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Boston office, met with Cabral in Sullivan's office on June 16, 2003, and urged the sheriff to let Porter return to her job. She said the sheriff denied the request, in part because word of her cooperation had leaked and she'd no longer be safe at the facility.

Sullivan and Kaiser also urged Cabral during the meeting to notify her employees that it was appropriate for them ''to go outside the department if they suspected wrongdoing or abuse" without first alerting internal investigators, Keeley testified. But she said Cabral refused to institute such a policy, saying she couldn't properly run her department if employees weren't required to first report any allegations of wrongdoing within the department.

The civil case centers on Porter's handling of an inmate's assertion on May 19, 2003, that he'd been assaulted by a correctional officer in his cell. Porter knew the inmate because she had fitted him with a recording device, at the FBI's request, when he'd been housed at the facility previously, before Cabral took over as sheriff in December 2002.

An FBI special agent, Christa Snyder, testified yesterday that Porter had been assisting the FBI in an investigation into civil rights violations of inmates housed at the House of Correction and the Nashua Street Jail. The investigation began before Cabral was sheriff.

Snyder told jurors that Porter called her on May 20, 2003, and said an inmate, who had previously been a witness for the FBI, had reported being assaulted by an officer. The agent said Porter told her she had observed bruising on the inmate's arm, though she hadn't examined him. The agent said she alerted a sheriff's investigator the next day about the allegations and advised him to check the inmate's medical records.

The agent testified that from the time Porter first started cooperating with the FBI, she had told the nurse that she was still obligated to report allegations of wrongdoing to internal investigators at the Sheriff's Department.