Extraordinary and Compelling Reasons

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Okay, well, here we are. Well, let's just start with you introducing yourself.
Okay, my name is Gary Settle. You are my current situation? Yeah.
Where are we right now? Okay. These nice ladies have come to visit me at FMC Butner, which is a federal prison hospital in North Carolina.
Butner is one of seven federal prisons that houses inmates with significant health issues. Bernie Madoff was treated at Butner.
So was Ted Kaczynski. Gary Settle has been in prison since 1993.
What's your day-to-day life like here? Um, all right, well, it's just like any prison. We're confined to ourselves for a part overnight and for different parts of the day.
But for me, I get up in the morning, get my medication together and all that. I have a class at 1230 living with chronic illness that I'm going to, I'm a mentor in, I'm in that class too.
Then I'm hopefully going to get outside and get some fresh air. How long can you go outside for a day? The chemo I'm on, it causes me to flushing.
My face will get purple if I stay out too long. But I generally get a couple hours a day anyway, sometimes more.
As it cools off, I'll probably get a little bit more. And what time do you have to be in your cell at night? 8.30.
And they open the doors around 6 in the morning. And most of the day we're out, we have a little hour period of time in the middle of the day where they count.

But every three weeks I do immunotherapy on a Wednesday and chemotherapy on a Friday.

And I have some other issues.

So I have appointments throughout the week.

But for the most part, I do a lot of reading, communicate with my friends and family, and sit around and wait.

Wait for what?

Either to go home or die.

I mean, that's because I don't think I'll leave here again.

In 2018, after he'd been in prison for over two decades,

he went to the doctor for a checkup. At the time, he said he felt weird.
His blood work came back abnormal. The doctors did a biopsy that showed he likely had prostate cancer.
Gary was transferred to a prison with medical facilities, Butner Federal Correctional Complex, in North Carolina. While we were waiting to go see Gary, we watched doctors come in wearing protective vests over their scrubs and putting their stethoscopes through the metal detector.
How are you feeling? About like you'd expect after six years of treatment. I'll say this, I'm better off than some of the poor guys I see up there on the floor.
When I first came here, I had never really been around sick people. It's strange to say, but in the institutions I was incarcerated in, everybody was pretty healthy.
When you were gone, when you were sick, you came to a place like this. I mean, people, Butner, when you hear Butner, people have heard about this place before.
It's not a little unknown prison somewhere. I mean, this place has a reputation.
Yes. It's ironic.
My first day here, people get newspapers and they'll leave them laying around for the next person. My first day here, I picked up the USA Today and I looked in around the state section and it had a lawsuit.
Butner, this place had just paid someone because the guy came here and lost his vision. The man, Vinara Nahr, knew he had a degenerative eye disease.
According to the lawsuit, as his eyesight got worse, he repeatedly asked staff for treatment. By the time he did see a surgeon, the doctor said he urgently needed an operation and scheduled it for the next day.
But it was too late. We asked Butner about this.
The Bureau of Prisons replied saying that, for privacy reasons, they could not comment. And I don't want to criticize the medical staff here per se, but it's a bureaucracy.
And I probably had cancer. I probably had this cancer for a year or two before I was diagnosed, because you don't get the normal tests that a normal person would get.
When you heard that you were going to be moved here to Butner, what did you think? That's when I really realized that there was really something wrong with me because in a regular, I say it keeps in a regular prison, but a normal prison that's designed for security reasons more so than medical, like this is, you didn't get a lot of medical treatment there because you didn't need it. So when I knew that they took the step to bring me here, that I was worse off than what I thought.
You know, I've always thought about this. My father had cancer, and I was with him when he was having chemo and radiation, and he was really sick after he would get chemo or the radiation.
And we'd take him home, and I would be trying to get him to eat and drink, and he'd be nauseous and feeling, and I'd be trying to feed him anything I could to get him to. Does that happen here when you finish your treatments? Are they giving you lots of food options? No.
I did the 42 radiation treatments first, and now I've done 12 rounds of chemo and six rounds of immunotherapy. No, they don't give us a lot of food options, and it's so strange.
The more I've read into my own cancer, I found out that sugar isn't really bad for cancer. Well, the options that we can buy on the commissary here, which is the inmate store, it's predominantly sugar items.
We can't buy any fresh produce and there's security concerns. And I understand all that, but I just always thought that a place like this that was designed for medical cases for the most part, that you should have healthy alternatives here that might not be available in a place that didn't have medical conditions, but nobody listens to me.
And if you've had a hard chemo treatment, is someone checking up on you? Is someone saying, you know, Gary, what can I bring you? I see that you're struggling. So a lot of us rely on each other.
And so there's like little support groups. And they have inmate workers here that do a good job too.
ICPs or Inmate Cadre Program, I think it is. But a lot of us check on each other, and it's about the best you could do.
They would push each other in wheelchairs if they were having trouble walking to meals, or to doctor's appointments, or to use the bathroom. It's fundamental to how I was raised in my family.
It's part of how I am. And the staff doesn't do a bad job, but they're overworked, understaffed.
In 2019, Gary happened to read an email newsletter from an organization called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. There was a new law called the First Step Act.
It included changes to the minimum amount of time judges could sentence people for some drug-related crimes. Correctional officers could no longer use restraints on pregnant inmates.
And it ordered the Bureau of Prisons to assign inmates to prisons as close to their home as possible. It also changed how inmates could apply for something called compassionate release.
Compassionate release was introduced in 1984. It allows the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ask a judge to reduce an inmate's sentence for extraordinary and compelling circumstances, like terminal illness and serious health issues related to old age.

In 2019, the New York Times reported that about 20% of people in prison were 50 years old or older. Researchers say that people in prison age faster than people outside of prison, so in many cases, age 50 and up is considered elderly.
But most prisons weren't designed to support aging inmates' health needs. You know, people are still required to walk far to get their pills, or they might not be able to have the same kind of pain medication or with the same frequency.
And so the ability to provide a comforting environment is certainly circumscribed by the prison environment. Anna Altman is a journalist who's written about compassionate release.
People who have been in prison for a long time, which many people who are dying in prison have been in prison a long time, they don't necessarily trust the system that is containing them, and they don't therefore necessarily trust the doctors that are employed by that system to care for them. So they don't know if they're getting full information, they might not be able to request certain things, and so there isn't a feeling that they are able to advocate for themselves or ask for the medication or the comfort measures that might make them more comfortable in their final days.
And so I do think it's a different experience of receiving hospice or palliative care in a prison setting than it would be in the community. Before the First Step Act, prisoners had to apply for compassionate release from their warden,

who could choose to send it up the chain until it reached the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The BOP would review the requests and decide whether to approve or deny them.
If they were approved, the application would be seen by a judge. In practice, what that meant was that someone might request from the warden that they go home because, let's say, they had a terminal cancer diagnosis or they were on dialysis or something of that variety.
But the warden didn't have to respond. The warden could basically put that piece of paper in a drawer and forget about it.
And if that happened, the prisoner had nothing that they could do about it. Between 2013 and 2017, the Marshall Project and the New York Times found that out of 5,400 requests for a compassionate release, the Bureau approved 6% of applications.
They usually only approve them if an inmate had a terminal illness with less than one year to live. One report found that over a span of six years, 13% of prisoners died before finding out about their application.
In 2018, the process changed. The First Step Act allowed inmates to petition a judge on their own if the BOP denied their application or if they didn't respond to it within 30 days.
In the newsletter about the new law that Gary Settle was reading, families against mandatory minimums mentioned something called the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse. Which was basically the system that they set up where they had pro bono lawyers and federal defenders who were willing to work with prisoners to help them apply for compassionate release.
Gary didn't think he qualified, but he realized that many of the inmates at Butner did, like one man named Bobby Smith. He weighed about 90 pounds, and he had a feeding tube, and he had lung cancer because he couldn't eat't eat and he would have cough so bad that he would expel the feeding tube he was one of the guys we were watching because he had good and bad days and like i said he had lung cancer and he ended up getting pneumonia on top of that and i asked him hey you know this organization you know they're willing to look at your stuff to see if you have any, as we would say, anything coming in court.

And it was like you don't find many atheists in a foxhole.

You're not going to find many people on that floor that will turn down help if someone says, hey, you want to take a shot to see if you can go home?

Bobby was in the hospice ward at Butner.

The doctors thought he had less than a year to live. He couldn't even get on the computer.
He couldn't type, so I was interacting for him. Gary wrote an email to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, FAM for short, to see if they could help Bobby.
FAM found a lawyer to help Bobby, but the lawyer wasn't able to get updated information from the BOP about how Bobby was doing. Gary would provide updates, telling the lawyer when one of Bobby's lungs had collapsed, and when Bobby was taken to a hospital outside of the prison for treatment.
The lawyer was able to get that information in front of a judge so that the judge could grant Mr. Smith release.
Gary remembers that the judge made the decision while Bobby was still in the hospital. When Bobby got back to Butner, Gary told him he was going home.
He says Bobby didn't know what to say. For FAM, they had always had this idea that if the law changed and if they could communicate to people in prison that they had the option to have legal representation and ask a judge directly that that could change access to compassionate release, but they didn't know for sure if that was true.
So that was a really important case for them. Everybody kind of watched, and that's kind of how everything took off and steamrolled, and it became the thing that it became.
Gary Settle estimates that he's helped more than 40 inmates go home.

I'm Phoebe Judge.

This is Criminal.

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See Mint Mobile for details. Gary Settle says that whenever he saw another inmate at Butner getting really sick, he would ask them if they wanted to try to apply for compassionate release.
I got a little practice doing the paperwork, and that's a lot of what it is, just paperwork. And a lot of them just wouldn't have done it just because they wouldn't know what to do.
They wouldn't even know how to communicate or get their medical records because that's part of it. I would get their medical records and then explain to the lawyers or fam in the submission what's going on with them.
I do a small part. I just help them with the paperwork in here and maybe communicate with the lawyers for them because some of them aren't comfortable with the communication.
And some of these guys that haven't been locked up very long don't know how to use the computer. So I just help with some of the bureaucratic stuff and bring attention to certain cases.
And when you look at them on paper, once you understand what those words mean, these guys are really bad shape.

Have you ever gone up to someone who's in really bad shape, very sick, and said, hey, I think we should work on an application for you?

And have you ever had a guy say, I'm so sick.

I don't, you know, it's not even worth it. I'm too sick.
I'm too tired. I don't have the energy to try to fight for this.
Yeah, I have had that happen. And before the compassionate release law was changed, there was essentially no chance.
But honestly, after the first couple cases here, and I'm sure it was like that in other places, when people actually saw, because we were shocked to see people going out the door.

I think a lot of guys who might have felt that way prior to the law change, not only did they change their mind or their thought process of it,

I think it actually gave a lot of guys a lot of a mental boost

to be stronger in their fight.

Tell me about some of the other men that you've helped.

There was a young kid here from Montana,

and it struck me because he was, at the time,

close to my son's age, in his late 20s.

And he was half white and half Native American. His name was Victor.
And he had a terrible cancer. I can't recall the name of it, but it attaches to the long bones of your body that actually had to remove his rib cage on the right left side of his body.
Well, to make a long story short, he came back with the cancer spread. And I had just got involved in this, and he was a good friend of mine.
So I began helping him. And right before the end, he made it about four or five months out on the street.
And I spoke to him a couple times. He was able to spend some time with his nieces and nephews and his family before he died.
Gary says that once, one of the men he helped was granted compassionate release, but couldn't find anywhere to stay once he got out. The court would grant him release if he could have had a place for him to go.
And he didn't, and he passed away here. and I don't really count him as a victory even though he kind of got uh justification in the court that he should go home and and there's another gentleman richard hawes is a real country guy and he had hepatitis c real bad and he was approached i think by one of the colleges in kentucky and asked if he wanted to participate in this situation where they would give him a liver and kidney transplant from a person who had died who had hepatitis C already.
And they did that, and then they gave him the new hepatitis C treatment to see if it would work. It would be like a clinical trial type thing.
He did that, and then he lived, and the hepatitis was cured.

But he had to take these drugs to suppress his immune system from attacking those organs over the years.

Well, when COVID kicked in, you know, we were making the point,

hey, he can't take the vaccine, and he's also taking something that's lowering his immune system.

And he got really, really sick. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found that infection rates were five to six times higher in prison than in the general population.
It's hard to know how many people in federal prisons like Butner died from COVID. The New York Times reported that the Justice

Department stopped collecting and analyzing data about federal and state prison deaths in 2019.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and Brigham Women's Hospital estimate

that people in prison died at a rate over three times higher than people outside of prison in 2020.

And so very quickly after COVID started to spread in prisons, and it was clear how many people were getting sick and dying in prison from the virus, people saw this as an extraordinary and compelling circumstance that was impacting people's health. In 2020, the number of compassionate release requests went way up, from just under 2,000 to almost 31,000.
Richard Hodge, the man with hepatitis C, was one of those applicants. He got out, and he's still doing good.
I've communicated with him recently. He wrote a really heartwarming email about his family and about the situation he was in out there.
And it just makes the point of the whole term compassionate release. He was able to get out because he was still during COVID.
He almost died the first time he got it. The second time he got it, he probably would have.
Have there been cases where someone

who you've tried to help has had their compassionate release denied? Yeah, nobody.

This sounds bad, but the only person who I've ever been involved with who had a terminal

diagnosis that was denied is me. In 1990, Gary Settle was 24 and living in Florida.
He got an idea to rob a bank. We were, this was not a crackerjack organization.
This is more like the Apple Dumpling Gang. It was me and some of my idiot buddies, because we were just a bunch of dumb kids.
We didn't have this cops and robbers thing. It was just done more of a, well, I think I can do that type thing.
So I remember laughing about it afterwards when I had dumped out a big bag full of money, and then we went and proceeded to get drunk. That's just, that's how childish it was.
He decided to do it again. By 1992, Gary was wanted by the FBI for robbing seven banks over a year and a half.
The FBI said he was armed, dangerous, and ready to strike again. And what was your life like at the time? Were you just kind of like a, you know? I lived in Florida.
I owned my own construction company. It wasn't a big company, but me and my buddy were the bosses.
I lived in a nice place. I had a nice car, a boat.
Everything was golden. I drank a lot.
And I think I'm what I always consider not just a functioning alcoholic, but I think I had some kind of alcohol dementia because for about a good 10 years, I drank a lot. and I guess if I was sober, I might have been, I was doing pretty good.
I probably would have

enjoyed it more. My parents lived in Florida.
My, my, my son and my ex-wife were around. Uh, I was able to spend time with my son.
Um, had my, a group of friends of mine around that I'd let in, I'd led into this. Um, none of them went to jail except the, the, the two guys that got caught and testified against me.
I think I had a pretty decent life for a middle-class upbringing. Without any college, I thought I was doing pretty good.
Did you know the FBI was looking for you? No. And I was so naive about the law.
I thought that once the robberies were over with and all the stuff the evidence was gone that was the end of it i had no idea there was conspiracy laws or someone could say he did that i didn't know and so i got away with it okay we're safe yeah yep because knowing that i wore a mask and gloves and i wasn't very smart i just thought Yeah. Yep.
Because I wore a mask and gloves and I wasn't very smart. I just thought, no, I didn't give, and I actually didn't even think about the consequences if I was caught because I was putting it on my scale of right and wrong.
Well, I didn't hurt anybody. I just took some money.
I wouldn't have thought that the consequences wouldn't be that bad if I was caught. How much did you steal in total? They say the government's contention is around $190,000 from the robberies.
And then they allege I was involved in another robbery in another state, which I don't know what they're talking about. I wasn't charged with it.
But not much, nowhere near enough. But no amount of money would be enough for what I put my family through and what I did to those people just trying to work a job in those banks.
What did you do with all the money? Well, most of it just got spent in a partying lifestyle. Most of it was spent on frivolous stuff.
Like nothing that you could show for it now? No. I mean, my liver might be a little enlarged, I guess, but no, nothing worthwhile at all.
In 1992, while Gary was on a trip in Massachusetts, he was stopped by police for a traffic violation. When they ran his license, they found a warrant for his arrest.
He was indicted on nine counts of bank robbery, one count of attempted bank robbery, one count of conspiracy, and ten counts of carrying a firearm while committing a violent crime. He was eventually convicted on the robbery and firearms charges.
For the times that Gary had used a gun in a robbery, the judge gave him a total of 165 years, the mandatory minimum for the charges, plus another 12 years for the robbery charges. She ordered Gary to serve the 177 years consecutively.
At the time, the judge said, I do not think this is an appropriate result, but I feel bound by the law. Less than 10 years earlier, in 1984, Congress had passed the Sentencing Reform Act.
It was intended to prevent judges from choosing any random number of years in prison as a way to counteract a perception that judges were being too lenient. What did you think when you heard? I'd never been through anything like that.
Probably the most vivid memory I have is my sentencing. And how those work is the judge, the prosecutor, some of the other court people figure out the math, how much time you have.
And they were throwing numbers around, no, it's 2,147 months with all the it that's it went on for a while and it was real

casual like they were ordering lunch and as they were going through the numbers I was thinking

well 120 months is 10 years and they're they were sitting there talking about several thousand months

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A few years after he was convicted and sentenced to 177 years, Gary Settle tried to break out of prison along with two other prisoners, including Woody Harrelson's father, who'd been convicted of murder. They made a rope and tried to climb over the wall.
They gave up when a guard fired a warning shot. It made the news.
Gary told us that he wasn't always a model prisoner or, quote, a big follower of the rules. I participated in illegal activities like gambling and just things like that.
Like I said, you can have an altercation with someone. You can be in the wrong unit.
You can get into it. There's a lot of rules.
There's a lot of rules. And to put it in perspective, I've been locked up for 32 years.
I have had 14 incident reports. And 10 of those were in the first 10 years of my incarceration.
So, I mean, it's not good. Some guys have none.
But it's easier here to stay out of trouble because there's more stuff to concentrate on to do, more positive stuff to do.

And you just don't have the energy for it either.

Getting cancer treatment, so it's just time to just rest and let my body heal itself when it can.

I just, I'm tired of, I got tired of fighting with them about stuff. So now I'm just trying to do what, do the right thing.
I've come to be more accepting of my responsibility. And no matter how much I don't approve of the way the law is structured that has me, it's a strange law that has me in this situation.
Well, my actions have me in this situation. But I made the choices to put myself in this position, ultimately.
That's, I can't make it better. How old are you? I am 58 years old.
You're not that old. Well, I feel that old.
I was relatively healthy until 2017, and then I kind of started falling apart since then. I've had knee replacements.
I got problems with my wrist and just a bunch of different things going on. Not as bad as some guys, but bad enough, and it makes me feel old.
I guess I feel old, too, because I feel I've had a fruitless life. In 2020, a lawyer friend told Gary that he should apply for compassionate release for himself.
At the time, his cancer was in remission, but Gary also had a thyroid disorder and was at risk for severe COVID. She helped him file a motion in January 2021.
The motion read, During his almost three decades of incarceration, Mr. Settle has grown from a reckless young man into a thoughtful, middle-aged man known for the meaningful relationships he builds with others.
His lawyers argued that Gary's work helping other inmates get compassionate release demonstrated his sincere rehabilitation. The application also included letters from the people Gary had helped.
Gary wrote his own letter and said, I have a very small family, but I dream of an opportunity to be part of their lives. About a month later, a judge denied Gary's motion.
He said that because Gary wasn't terminal and was independent enough to care for himself, he did not qualify for compassionate release, even with his risk for COVID. Almost two weeks later,

Gary found out that his cancer had returned.

In September of 2021,

Gary says he was given a prognosis of 18 months.

He applied for compassionate release again.

Until then, he had kept his cancer secret from his mother,

but this time he would have to tell her. She would be the person he would live with if he was released.
He asked her to come visit so he could tell her in person. She took the diagnosis to heart because she hadn't seen me.
So I wanted her to come here so she could talk to me and see me face to face because I didn't want to be on the institutional phone.

They're all recorded.

I didn't want to say something that could be misconstrued.

I wanted her to see me.

Gary's mother is 84.

Still working on her yard.

Cancer survivor.

My father died of cancer early on in my incarceration

while I was locked down because of not being a model prisoner. So she went through that by herself.
You'll be surprised how many people, probably you wouldn't be, how many guys in prison you meet are mama's boys like me. After he was arrested in 1992, he remembers his mother visiting him in the county jail.
First thing she said, through the glass, because it was with the phone, she looked at me and mouthed the words, did you do it? And I looked at her and I said yes, and nodded. And she put her head down and then brought her head up and has been with me the whole time ever since.

How often do you get to talk to her?

Every day.

When was the last time you saw her?

Let's see. I think it was May.

Gary filed his second application for release in 2022.

His prostate cancer was now stage four, and scans indicated that it had spread to his spine and lymph nodes. That May, he tested positive for COVID.
Gary's lawyers filed his motion for compassionate release and requested to expedite it because of his COVID infection. The judge denied the request.
He said he didn't see any evidence of rehabilitation and found Gary's remorse disingenuous. He was concerned that Gary had never directly apologized to his victims.
Gary told us he doesn't know how he would have. He's continued to help other inmates at Butner with their own applications.
It's a bittersweet thing. It's great to see someone go home like some kid went home yesterday.
It's just sometimes I have to think, you know, I hope they're going to go out there and do good. You know, I think they are, but I, it's that, okay, he's getting out.
And it's, it's, it's, I'm being completely frank here. Sometimes it's, you know, it's great that the people are getting let out, but they're, how about me? You know, it's, it's selfish to say, but it's, it's a thought that I do have.
Doesn't discourage me from doing it because in the end of the day or into my day, at least I'm trying to do something positive.

And I can't not do something looking at these guys. If anybody can look at these guys up here and have even the slightest ability to help them and not do it, there's something wrong with them.
So where are you in your, you've been denied really as compassionate, twice. Is that it? Can you apply again? Well the the many great lawyers that were involved with my the efforts on my behalf julianna and donnie and there's a bunch of them um really good people mary price mainly um they've advised me that my option right now is what's they're trying to they're they're submitting a petition for executive clemency right now.

And it's going to have attached the prior motions and all the medical reports and everything.

So that's what's being done right now.

How far are you into your sentence right now? A couple weeks ago, I completed 32 years straight.

You have 140 years left.

Gary was told he had 18 months left to live in 2021.

We spoke to him at Butner in September 2024. It's a tough, tough, you know, I, who'd have thought I was going to get cancer and, you know, and, and I don't know about how the diagnosis stuff works.
I know, um, I've watched guys with my same cancer. So I kind of have an idea where things are going, you know, going forward.
I could be worse. I'm a mentor in a pain management class here.
And we had a class yesterday and some of the new guys, a new class, and some of the guys were listing their issues. and I said then I I didn't really want to say what I have because I felt, because these guys, as I said again, I keep saying this, but I mean, I know hospitals are pleasant places, but there's some guys in bad shape here.
And some of the ailments these guys are dealing with on a day-to-day basis besides pancreatic cancer and all these other things could be worse. Gary says recently he helped a man with a rare brain cancer get out.
He also helped another inmate whose application had gotten stuck waiting for review by the Bureau of Prisons. You know, why do you keep doing this? Um, I can't give you a specific answer other than I feel like I'm compelled to because, one, it's very empowering to see somebody go home from a cancer floor.
Um, as I said, that's how I was raised and, um,'t know, 100%. I liked, part of it, I guess, I'll be frank, part of my motivation is I know that a lot of people that are involved in the criminal justice system don't like to see people get released.
I've always thought that in some of these submissions that we should take a picture and just show the judge, look at this guy.

Because what they rely on, like they did in my case, essentially, is I'm a threat to society.

You see these guys up here, they're not a threat to nothing.

They can barely get out of bed, some of them.

And most of us just want to go home and see our families and try to mend fences.

That's what most of us want to do, spend time with our families.

Since 2019, over 5,000 people across the country

have been granted compassionate release.

You can learn more about Gary Settle

in Anna Altman's piece,

The Quality of Mercy, in the Atavis magazine. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.
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