Cabral defends her ouster of nurse
Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea J. Cabral testified yesterday in federal court that she didn't know that a longtime nurse practitioner at the House of Correction was an FBI informant when she ordered her barred from the facility in 2003.
Cabral told jurors that Sheila Porter wasn't barred from the facility because of her relationship with the FBI, but rather because the sheriff thought it was ''appalling" that she failed to immediately document an inmate's allegation that he had been assaulted by a correctional officer.
''It's not acceptable to me that someone who is hired by the department to provide care of an inmate and receives a report . . . does not put it in the medical record," said Cabral, adding that internal investigators didn't receive a report from Porter until 10 days later, even though she'd been asked to file one immediately.
It was Cabral's second day on the stand, as lawyers from both sides finished presenting evidence in a civil trial in US District Court in Boston over Porter's $2 million suit alleging that Cabral and her department illegally barred Porter from the facility for talking to the FBI about an inmate. The jury is to hear final arguments today.
Porter, who worked for a private firm contracted to provide health services to inmates, was fired from her company after she was barred from the facility where she had worked for nine years.
Last week, both Porter and an FBI agent testified that she was recruited by the bureau in late 1999 for an investigation into allegations that correctional officers, under Cabral's predecessor, Richard
Cabral was appointed by Acting Governor Jane Swift to take over as sheriff in November 2002. The civil case centers on Porter's response to an inmate's claim on May 19, 2003, that he was assaulted by a correctional officer. The inmate knew Porter because she had installed a hidden recorder on his body the previous year at the FBI's request, as part of its probe.
Porter testified the inmate told her he had been assaulted by a guard, showed her bruises, and urged her to call the FBI.
The nurse practitioner said she immediately reported the allegations to a supervisor, who alerted one of Cabral's top staffers, then called the FBI the next day. Porter said she wrote a report the same day as the incident, as she'd been instructed to do by the staffer, but took it home because her supervisor had left for the day. She said she forgot to turn it in until May 23, 2003, but the sheriff's staff said they didn't receive it for five days after that.
Porter said she didn't believe she was required to detail the inmate's allegations in his medical file because she had spoken with him for only a minute through his cell door and someone else had conducted his medical exam.
Yesterday, Cabral testified that she knew Porter had previously placed a wire on the inmate at the FBI's request, and that Porter had reported the inmate's allegations to the FBI in May 2003. But, she said, she didn't know Porter had a formal informant relationship with the FBI. ''I was certainly aware she had made a telephone call to the FBI, that didn't matter to me," Cabral said.
Cabral said she ordered Porter barred from the facility on June 10, 2003, and didn't learn she was an FBI informant until six days later, during a meeting with US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Kenneth Kaiser, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office.
Cabral said she rebuffed Sullivan's recommendation at the meeting that she encourage her staff to report misconduct directly to the FBI, saying it would undermine her attempt to reform the department if employees weren't required to report wrongdoing internally.
Asked if she believed she had done the right thing in barring Porter, Cabral said, ''I believe that barring Sheila Porter, given what I knew at the time, was appropriate. I don't think any human being can ever be certain that they have done the right thing."
