Brooklyn inmate gets reduced sentence after MDC botches cancer treatment

A federal judge gave an inmate at MDC Brooklyn a reduced sentence in a firebombing after jail staff ignored his lung cancer diagnosis for months — but it’s uncertain he’ll live to serve all seven years.

Terrence Wise’s medical mistreatment at the notorious federal lockup reduced his chance of surviving past five years to about 41%, though that number rises slightly if he gets a year of immunotherapy treatment, according to an expert who reviewed his case for his lawyers.

If the medical staff at MDC hadn’t botched his treatment and let the tumor in his lung double in size unchecked his chances at survival would have been much higher — “an expected 5-year survival of 80% with surgery alone,” wrote Dr. Philip Hoffman, a cancer expert and professor at the University of Chicago.

In a decision last month, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Diane Gujarati called the MDC’s handling of Wise’s treatment a ” significant factor” in her decision to cut nearly two years off the sentence prosecutors were asking for.

She gave the 55-year-old Wise seven years behind bars. He’s already served just over two years of that term while awaiting prosecution.

“This situation with respect to the MDC and Mr. Wise’s treatment is concerning,” the judge said at the Jan. 22 sentencing. “Mr. Wise, I don’t pretend to think that this is anything other than a very, very difficult day for you.”

It took medical staff at MDC months to take Wise’s health complaints seriously, according to court filings. He first became ill in fall 2023 and a doctor called for a CT scan on Nov. 7, 2023 — but that scan didn’t happen until Feb. 28 of the following year.

The scan revealed a 3.2 centimeter mass in his chest but Wise wasn’t told about it for months despite repeated requests and complaints of pain and coughing up blood.

Unbeknownst to Wise, jail staff got the results on March 11 and MDC’s clinical director, Dr. Bruce Bialor, signed that report a week later but “the results were somehow missed by the health services department”, MDC staff said in writing.

MDC nurse practitioner Beverly Timothy finally saw Wise on April 26 after he’d complained of coughing up blood for a month straight. She deemed the mass benign, according to his lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg of the Federal Defenders,

When Bialor finally had him hospitalized on May 3, a needle biopsy showed the mass had grown to 6.3 centimeters, according to his attorneys.

The prognosis got worse from there.

“Because of the MDC’s negligence and lapse, which they describe only as ‘missed’ and ‘unfortunate,’ Mr. Wise went from a course of cancer treatment that could have been relatively simple and instead has undergone the full gamut of chemotherapy, radiation, open lung surgery,
immunotherapy,” Eisner-Grynberg told Gujarati during the sentencing.

“And as he sits here today he still has cancer in his body that has not been cured or even removed by this course of treatment because, ultimately, the surgery revealed that the cancer was even more serious than previously realized and had gotten into his lymph nodes.”

MDC Brooklyn, the city’s only federal jail, has long been plagued by delays in medical treatment, missed medical appointments, and botched diagnoses. In a second case last year, the jail’s medical staff largely ignored an inmate’s medical complaints for months as a cancerous tumor grew in his leg.

As judges in Manhattan and Brooklyn continue to decry the dire conditions there, the jail’s population — which includes Sean “Diddy” Combs and alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione — has dropped from 1,600 inmates at the beginning of 2024 to about 1,150 inmates as of Sunday.

It has just two doctors on staff and an opening for a third physician has gone unfilled for nearly a decade, the jail’s clinical director, Bialor, testified in a hearing last month.

Eisner-Grynberg was for her client to be sentenced to time served and released but the judge ruled that Wise needed to serve prison time because of the nature of his crime and his lengthy criminal record.

Wise threw a Molotov cocktail at a van parked in Brooklyn in November 2022, then returned three days later to set the same van on fire. Two days after his second attempt, he lit a U-Haul van he was driving on fire after he got into an argument and someone rammed it.

He tried to flee cops in another U-Haul van before his arrest that December and bragged in a recorded phone call about throwing away components of a gun he had in the van, according to the feds.

His defense lawyer said personal tragedy led him to the commit the fiery crimes — his close friend was found in a dumpster, overdosed on fentanyl, so he found the dealer and threw a Molotov at his van. The dealer shot him in response, grazing his shoulder, and started threatening his life — and one of the dealer’s associates rammed the U-Haul van Wise then lit ablaze.

“I have remorse for what I’ve done and I deeply apologize with my heart. I realize that I deserve a punishment but death in prison isn’t a fair sentence and I don’t want to pass away in prison, especially knowing I have a life expectancy of five years,” Wise said in a long statement to the judge. “Every night I stay up staring into the top of my bunkie’s bottom bed, finding myself so afraid because I don’t want to be in prison in this way.”