By Theresa Schliep

Law360 (May 11, 2020, 5:39 PM EDT) -- A California man imprisoned for filing false tax returns has died of COVID-19, marking the seventh such death at a federal prison where about two-thirds of the inmates have contracted the novel coronavirus, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said.

Scott Douglas Cutting Sr., 70, died Saturday after suffering from shortness of breath, hypoxia and other symptoms related to COVID-19, the disease caused by virus, the bureau said in a statement that day. Cutting, convicted of filing false tax returns in 2019, had been serving a 26-month sentence at Federal Correctional Institution Terminal Island in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles, according to the statement.

That prison has 693 active cases of coronavirus out of a population of 1,042 inmates, or 66.5%, according to numbers updated Monday by the Bureau of Prisons. At least seven Terminal Island inmates have died of COVID-19, the bureau said.

U.S. District Judge George H. Wu sentenced Cutting to 26 months in prison in October 2019 after a jury convicted him of aiding in the filing of false tax returns, according to the judgment. He began his prison sentence on Jan. 7, the Bureau of Prisons said.

Cutting had long-term heath issues that put him at risk for developing a severe case of COVID-19, the bureau said in its statement.

Brianna Mircheff, deputy federal public defender, filed an emergency application on May 1 seeking Cutter's medical records and asking the court to compel the Bureau of Prisons to detail whether, in Cutter's case, the bureau had satisfied rules requiring it to make certain notifications to families when inmates fall terminally ill. She withdrew that application after the bureau made the required notifications and furnished medical records, according to filings. 

Cutting's daughter had received a call on April 29 from a Bureau of Prisons staffer who said that Cutting had been intubated, the emergency filing said. Cutter had been intubated at local hospital two weeks earlier, on April 15, according to the bureau's statement.

Cutting's son also received a call from a doctor who said that Cutting was dying and who asked him to sign a do-not-resuscitate order, according to the filing. On April 30, the daughter received an additional call indicating that her father wasn't doing well, according to the filing.

The rules require that the families of inmates found to have terminal illnesses be notified within three days so they can ask for sentence reductions, according to the emergency filing. Families are also supposed to be given an opportunity to visit the inmate within a week of diagnoses, the filing said. 

Mircheff declined to comment.

The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.

In late March, Attorney General William Barr issued a memorandum providing guidance for the Bureau of Prisons to use when considering releasing certain inmates to home confinement to mitigate the pandemic. That guidance advised that prisons should consider older inmates, inmates who are more vulnerable to the disease and inmates who were sentenced to low- or minimum-security facilities for home confinement.

Cutting is represented by Brianna Mircheff of the Federal Public Defender's Office.

The U.S. government is represented by Bryant Yuan Fu Yang and Veronica Alegria of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

The case is U.S. v. Scott Douglas Cutting Sr., case number 2:16-cr-00198, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.

--Additional reporting by Jody Godoy and Stewart Bishop. Editing by John Oudens.

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