Was Nebraska inmate Tom Fleming’s nearly 13-year stay in solitary confinement part of a vendetta against him by corrections officials?

Or was it based on his violent history — most notably a vicious assault on a corrections employee in1991 — and administrators’ real fears Fleming might strike again?

How Senior U.S. District Judge Warren Urbom answers those questions will determine whether Fleming, 45, prevails in his lawsuit.

The non-jury trial on the lawsuit began Monday before Urbom and concluded Tuesday with closing arguments from lawyers for Fleming and Nebraska corrections officials.

Fleming is seeking $1 million in punitive damages and unspecified compensatory and nominal damages against several Correctional Services officials, including deputy director Frank Hopkins, Tecumseh prison warden Fred Britten and former director Harold Clarke.

Clarke resigned last year and now heads the Washington state prison system.

Fleming claimed his placement in administrative segregation — nine years of which were spent in the department’s most restrictive administrative custody, intensive management — left him damaged, psychologically and physically.

In closing arguments, his attorney, Sue Ellen Wall, told Urbom that corrections officials who made decisions on Fleming’s custody status could not get beyond his involvement in the brutal assault of corrections employee Max Fredrickson during an Aug. 31, 1991, escape attempt at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

Fleming stabbed Fredrickson repeatedly with a homemade knife in the incident. Another inmate, Paul Kennedy, doused Fredrickson with a flammable fluid and set him on fire. Fredrickson survived.

Wall said Fleming’s custody status was reviewed 26 times by three-member committees from the time of his placement in administrative segregation in 1991 to his release back into the general prison population in January 2004.

She said only one member out of all those committees ever recommended a change in Fleming’s custody status, despite his clean record after 1995.

“What is alarming and puzzling is the unanimity of all these people,” she said. “Clearly, the message went out that there is no change in this man’s status.

“ … Nobody broke ranks for 13 years,” she continued. “Nobody looked at him as a human being.”

Sharon Lindgren, a correctional department attorney, argued Fleming never produced any memos or other documentation showing the department was out to get him for the assault on Fredrickson.

Fleming’s record — the robberies that sent him to prison, as well as the Fredrickson assault and assaults on another employee in 1992 and an inmate in 1995 — marked him as violent, she said.

“They (review committee members) kept reaching the same conclusions because they were looking at the same man,” Lindgren said. “There was no evidence anyone hated Mr. Fleming.

“… He committed acts that made it appear he was a security risk.”

Fleming was placed on the more-restrictive intensive management after the 1991 incident, and he was transferred to administrative confinement in December 2001.

Inmates in both types of custody remain in cells, described by Wall as seven-foot by 10-foot, 23 hours a day from Monday to Friday, and all day on Saturday and Sunday.

In addition, shower and visitation times, as well as access to telephone conversations, are sharply limited.

A key difference between intensive management and administrative confinement is that visits with family or friends under the former arrangement are conducted by phone with a glass wall between the prisoner and visitors. Prisoners in administrative confinement meet with visitors in open rooms.

Fleming testified Monday that his desire to meet with family directly gave him incentive to get off of intensive management by changing his behavior.

Wall told Urbom Tueday that the changed behavior, which resulted in no write-ups against Fleming for eight years, made no difference to the department.

She said Fleming’s status changed to administrative confinement only after a friend contacted other state officials, among them a state senator and Nebraska Ombudsman, about Fleming.

Similarly, Wall said, Fleming was released into the general population only after he filed the federal lawsuit.

“Magically, without a piece of paper, without a (formal) decision, they say, ‘Pack up you stuff. You’re getting out,’” she said.

Responded Lindgren: “There’s no evidence to support a link” between the lawsuit and Fleming’s return to the general population.

Determining when an inmate no longer poses a security risk is not based on hard science, she said.

“A little light doesn’t go off, ‘Oh, he’s done. He’s not going to hurt anyone,’” she said.

“It’s a weighing, it’s a very difficult process.”

Urbom did not say when he would rule on the case.

Reach Clarence Mabin at cmabin@journalstar.com or 473-7234.