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As Nashville attorney Gus Puryear wages the fight of his life for a federal judgeship, he’s struggled to explain how his company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), handled the death of one of its female inmates. New details are now emerging about whether CCA cooperated fully with detectives investigating the case, and Tennessee’s chief medical examiner continues to assail Puryear for his explanation about what happened to the 34-year-old mother of two. It all adds up to more trouble for Puryear, whose bid to be appointed to a spot on the federal bench in Tennessee’s Middle District is now in serious jeopardy.

In the early morning of July 5, 2004, inmate Estelle Richardson was found unresponsive in her solitary cell with a cracked skull, four broken ribs and a lacerated liver. She would be dead in hours. That morning, two Metro detectives showed up at the CCA-operated detention center looking for surveillance videotape. A camera was placed around her cell and should have recorded whether the four guards, who had earlier in the day forcibly removed her from her cell so they could clean it up, delivered a fatal blow during the charged encounter. It also could have shown if the inmate merely slipped one evening and hit her head.

Mike Roland, one of the detectives assigned to the case, recalls that when he and his partner asked for the camera, the guards told them it hadn’t been working, a convenient excuse considering the circumstances of the victim’s death. And, sure enough, when Roland’s partner inspected the equipment, he couldn’t find anything unusual that would have prevented it from documenting Richardson’s final days.

“They brought us the camera, and he felt like it was working fine,” Roland says. “Being an investigator, you always wonder about things like that—we’re always suspicious in nature—but that alone wouldn’t convict anybody.”

In May 2007, the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office dropped all criminal charges against the four prison guards accused of killing Richardson when they couldn’t rule out the possibility that another inmate—and not the guards—injured her days before she was forcibly removed from her cell. While some inmates came forward claiming that they saw the guards abuse Richardson in her final days, others said that they saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, Richardson’s death remains one of the most baffling criminal cases in recent Nashville history. How could someone kill an inmate in a closed facility and get away with it? Or did Richardson merely suffer a seizure, hit her head on the concrete floor and succumb days later from the cumulative effect of a range of injuries and illnesses? Finally, was there ever any videotape of Richardson’s interaction with her guards, which could’ve solved the case immediately? (CCA has refused repeated requests to discuss the case.)

Now Puryear, CCA’s lead attorney, is trying to defend his company’s treatment of Richardson and subsequent investigation of her death before members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, hoping to strike the right balance between defending his client and providing a thorough account of what happened. So far, the judicial nominee has offered an explanation that largely casts CCA in a positive light, though there are other more troubling theories of what happened to Richardson in the days before her death that he glosses over.

Puryear initially told Senate members that the four CCA guards charged in Richardson’s murder were “exonerated.” Actually, the charges against them were dropped only after the district attorney concluded the case couldn’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But, unlike in the Duke Lacrosse case, the prosecutor never offered evidence in favor of the guards.

“I’m not saying it was a guard or not,” says Rob McGuire, the assistant district attorney who handled the case. “I don’t know.”

Puryear’s use of the word “exonerated” may seem trivial, but in the context of the rest of his shaky testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which the nominee fielded pointed questions about his lack of courtroom experience, critics jumped at the chance to parse his language. Sen. Ted Kennedy, for one, asked why he claimed the guards were “exonerated.” In his written response, Puryear backtracked, making the awkward claim that he was merely talking like a layman.

“I was using this term according to its common, colloquial meaning,” he wrote.

Puryear also told the senators it was not clear how Richardson received her head injuries, and he also said that she might have sustained her rib and liver damage during the CPR efforts to revive her.

That explanation may seem implausible, but Richardson’s family accepted it and settled a civil case against the company before the criminal charges were dropped.

In fact, experts for both sides say that a close inspection of Richardson’s skull fracture indicates it occurred days before guards removed her from her cell.

But neither McGuire nor Dr. Bruce Levy, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy and ruled it a homicide, believes that Richardson’s death was an accident.

“Someone administered the fatal blow,” McGuire says. “We just don’t know how or when or who or under what circumstances.”

McGuire says that when his office couldn’t pin down the time of her head injuries, it made it almost impossible to prove that the guards caused her death as they removed her fromthecell. That uncertainty alsoallowed foralternate explanationsfor her death, includingthepossibilitythat she washurtin a fight with another inmate. McGuire adds that it’s possible Richardson could have lived with her injuries for days before finally dying. She was medicated at the time, which could have masked her pain, and she also might have been afraid to admit to guards that she was involved in a fight. McGuire doesn’t say such a scenario is particularly likely, but his office’s inability to rule it out prevented the case from going forward.

Still, even those circumstances wouldn’t let CCA off the hook, instead raising questions about how the prison company oversees inmates.

Levy continues to believe Richardson was murdered, and was so offended by Puryear’s Senate testimony that he penned a letter to the judiciary committee telling them so. Though he has not been able to pinpoint the time of her head injuries, he says it is highly unlikely that they were sustained days before her death. He notes that both the nature of her head and chest injuries—they form a straight line on her body—and the damage to her skull indicate that she was injured in a single physical encounter shortly before she was found unresponsive. That possibility would almost certainly implicate one or all four of the CCA guards. Maybe they didn’t mean to kill her, he speculates, but that’s what happened anyway.

“When I did this autopsy and first saw these injuries, I was sure we were going to hear from the guards, ‘one or more of us fell on top of her as she hit the ground,’ ” Levy tells the Scene. “Either she was thrown to the floor as part of a struggle or she fell to the floor with people on top of her.”

What about the medical experts for both Richardson and CCA who concluded that the inmate’s skull fracture occurred before she was removed from her cell? Levy says that they may be overlooking new evidence that shows how quickly the body responds to an injury at the cellular level. That research might explain why Richardson’s body seemed to have been fighting off an injury for days—or even weeks—when it might have actually occurred on the day of her death. Besides, Levy says, the alternate explanation—that Richardson suffered a seizure, fell and then passed out four or five days later, only to sustain new injuries to her ribs and liver during CPR—simply defies common sense.

“The head injuries and rib injuries appear to be of similar ages,” he says. “If you look at a woman who has a skull fracture and multiple rib injuries, it’s hard to believe she was walking around for five days or more without making a complaint about those injuries.”

But if the exact circumstances of Richardson’s death remain elusive, the important question is, what did CCA do to solve the case?

In his correspondence with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who presided over the judicial hearings, Puryear explains, “CCA cooperated fully with all law enforcement investigations into her death.” And interestingly, detective Mike Roland largely supports the nominee’s contention, saying the warden of the facility at the time even allowed him to interview witnesses in his office. As to the story of the supposedly malfunctioning camera, the detective is reluctant to characterize that as damning evidence. But McGuire, who worked closely on the case, says it definitely made him think twice.

“That was a significant problem for us,” he says. “It certainly didn’t help their cause.”