Aysel Tugluk, a slight brunette with high cheekbones, eagle eyes and long, dark hair, garnered much curiosity during the courtroom trial of Abdullah Ocalan, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader who has been serving a life sentence since 1999 in a prison on Imrali Island off the coast of Istanbul. She was among the more than 50 lawyers defending Ocalan, who was captured in Nairobi, Kenya, in February of that year with the help of the CIA. She was also the most fearless and spirited. This reporter was present at two of the hearings.

Today, 56-year-old Tugluk is languishing in a Turkish jail and serving out a 10-year sentence on specious terrorism charges. She is in the advanced stages of dementia. A shadow of her former combative self, she has severe memory loss and is incapable of tending to her most basic needs. Tugluk must be freed immediately in order to receive proper physical and medical care, which is unavailable in prison. That was the formal opinion delivered by a committee of nine physicians at a government hospital in the western province of Kocaeli in February following seven months of exhaustive testing. However, its opinion was shot down eight months later by the state-run Forensic Medicine Institute (FMI) in Istanbul, which treated her illness “as if it was some kind of a joke and appeared to suggest that she was faking her condition,” said Reyhan Yalcindag, a prominent human rights lawyer who has known Tugluk for 25 years and is part of her legal team. The chief prosecutor’s office ruled that she would remain in jail.

Tugluk’s case is emblematic of the institutionalized cruelty that defines Turkey’s treatment of terminally ill inmates, with the worst indignities reserved for political detainees. The Turkish Human Rights Association says there are 1,605 seriously ill people in Turkish jails. Some 600 are in critical condition, said Ercan Yilmaz, who deals with such cases for the Human Rights Association. By its reckoning, at least 103 of them have died in prison since July 2016 when the government began arresting people by the tens of thousands on suspicion of involvement in the failed attempt to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “They wait till people have become living corpses in the rare cases that they set them free,” Yalcindag told Al-Monitor. “Soon after, they die."

Under the current system, when the defense appeals to the authorities for their client’s sentence to be commuted, prosecutors refer them to the local government hospital for an assessment. That assessment is, in turn, taken up by the FMI. More often than not, the FMI determines that the case is without merit, as it did with Tugluk.