by Denis O’Hearn
MRZine
January 19th, 2011
Three
death-sentenced men went on hunger strike in Ohio State Penitentiary
on January 3 to win the same rights as others on death row in the
state. On Saturday January 15, the twelfth day of their protest, a
crowd of supporters gathered in the parking lot by the tiny
evangelical church at the entrance to the prison on the outskirts of
Youngstown. They ranged from the elderly and religious to human rights
supporters to members of various left groups. They were expecting to
participate in the first of a series of events in coming weeks to
support the men on their road to force-feeding, or even possible death.
Things did not turn out as expected. For once, this was for the
better.
The day’s events began when a small delegation made up
of the hunger strikers’ relatives and friends (Keith Lamar’s Uncle
Dwight, Siddique Hasan’s friend Brother Abdul, and Alice Lynd for Jason
Robb), went up to the prison through the snow and ice to deliver an Open
Letter addressed to OSP Warden David Bobby and Ohio’s state prison
officials. The letter, which supported the demands of the hunger
strikers, was signed by more than 1,200 people including the famous
(Noam Chomsky), human-rights-leaning legal experts from Ohio and around
the world, prominent academics and writers, and ordinary retired
teachers and religious ministers. It was Saturday, so Warden Bobby was
not there to meet the delegation, but he’d been aware of their coming
and left someone at the front desk to take the letter.
Hopeful
word of a settlement of the hunger strike had been circulating among a
few friends and activists for two days. It was definitively confirmed
that morning when visitors to Jason Robb received a copy of a written
agreement from Warden Bobby (see below) outlining a settlement that
provided practically all of their demands, despite his insistence at the
beginning of the strike that he would not give in to duress.
Although
the hunger strikers told me that they were optimistic from the very
beginning, there were grounds to expect a harder battle. Bomani Shakur
(Keith Lamar) described an incident with the Deputy Warden at the
beginning of his protest.
“You know, LaMar, a human being can only go so long without food,” he chided Shakur.
“Yeah, I know,” replied Bomani, “but according to the state of Ohio I’m not human, so I don’t have to worry about that!”
Nonetheless,
Warden Bobby and his deputies had been meeting with the hunger strikers
for some days and they agreed that they would end their protest upon
receipt of the warden’s letter. Friends and relatives who came to visit
Siddique Hasan and Keith Lamar (aka Bomani Shakur) told visiting friends
and relatives similar details about the end of the strike. Both men
said that they had resumed eating.
Shakur told one of his friends
that he’d “just been eating hot-dogs.” She replied that it was crazy to
eat such things on an empty stomach. Bomani just laughed and said, “But
I was hungry, man!”
The delegation returned to the crowd and began the rally. The surprise was revealed to all. The hunger strike was over.
Jason
Robb’s victory statement was relayed to the crowd. He wanted to thank
everybody for their support, for without it the men would have won
nothing. But now, he said, it was time to shift the focus to the fact
that five men, including the three hunger strikers, are awaiting
execution for things they did not do.
“The energy around our
protest went viral,” he told Alice and Staughton Lynd on a prison visit.
“This time around the fight was for better prison conditions. Now we
begin fighting for our lives.”
Why a Hunger Strike?
The
“Lucasville Five” includes the three hunger strikers plus Namir Mateen,
who did not join the hunger strike due to medical complications, and
George Skatzes, who was transferred out of isolation at OSP after he was
diagnosed with chronic depression. All five are awaiting execution for a
variety of charges, mostly complicity in the murders of prisoners and a
guard during the Lucasville prison uprising of 1993. In a case that
resembles that of the Angola 3 in Louisiana, they have been held in
solitary isolation for 23 hours a day for more than 17 years, since the
evening the uprising ended. This is despite the fact that three of them
helped negotiate a settlement of the uprising that undoubtedly saved
lives, and despite a promise within the agreement that there would be no
retribution against any of the prisoners.
The Ohio prison
authorities went back on their word. They not only put the five men in
isolation but they built the supermax prison at Youngstown to hold them
that way in perpetuity. Having built the prison, they had to fill 500
beds, despite the fact that a small Secure Housing Unit at Lucasville
had never been full. But the 1990s were the decade of the supermax. So
men who were charged with minor offences found themselves locked up in
Youngstown on “Level 5 security,” meaning that they were held for 23
hours a day in a cell no bigger than a city parking space. The
steel-doored cells and even the recreation areas where they spent an
hour a day were built in such a way as to ensure that they would never
have contact with another living being — human, animal, or plant.
“Outdoor recreation” was in a cement-walled enclosure that was only
outdoor if you consider that the roof is a steel grille. Hundreds of
men have come and gone since 1998. Only four, the three hunger strikers
and Namir Mateen, remain locked up in perpetual isolation.
A case
is underway in the Middle District Court of Louisiana that is likely to
judge this kind of treatment as a violation of the eighth amendment
prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. It may be that the Ohio
authorities see the handwriting on the wall and they want to improve the
conditions of Ohio’s supermax before they are forced to do so by
another court ruling, like the Wilkinson vs Austin case of 2005 in which
the US Supreme Court forced them to improve conditions in the supermax.
One
of the holdings of the Supreme Court instructed the Ohio authorities to
follow Fifth Amendment provision on due process. In 2000, two years
after the supermax opened, they began giving annual reviews to the
death-sentenced Lucasville prisoners. But the reviews are not
meaningful. One of the reviews even concluded, “You were admitted to
OSP in May of 1998. We are of the opinion that your placement offense
is so severe that you should remain at the OSP permanently or for many
years regardless of your behavior while confined at the OSP.” Thus, the
four have been condemned to de facto permanent isolation.
This
lack of meaningful review, as well as the continued lack of human
contact despite the agreement that ended the Youngstown hunger strike,
might yet be the focus of litigation not just in Ohio but in other
supermaxes around the United States, such as California’s notorious
“Secure Housing Unit” at Pelican Bay State Prison.
The conditions
of supermax are a running sore on the US human rights record, a sort of
elephant in the room that few people want to talk about. Yet there is a
growing sentiment among experts and policymakers against extreme
isolation, both because of its cost but also due to the judgment that it
is a form of torture.
And it is these conditions of extreme
isolation, without hope of ever touching a fellow human apart from a
prison guard, that drove these men to the ultimate protest of hunger
strike. As Bomani Shakur wrote in a statement that announced his hunger
strike, none of the men wanted to die. But in such conditions of
isolation, and in the absence of any way of proving to the authorities
that they were not a security risk if allowed to mix with other
prisoners or have semi-contact visits, depriving themselves of food was
the only non-violent means of protest that remained for them.
What Now?
For
the Lucasville Five, the main attention turns now to their wrongful
convictions and to the death penalty itself. Ohio is the only state in
the US that executed more men in 2010 than in 2009. And it is second
only to Texas in its rate of executions. For the past two years, the
state has attempted to execute one man a month, although that attempt
has been slowed by botched executions and by some surprising grants of
clemency by former governor Ted Strickland. One can only hope that moves
away from the use of the death penalty in states like New Mexico and,
most recently, Illinois are the beginning of a more general move to do
away with this backward policy.
The hunger strikers expressed
their hopes, to relatives and other visitors, that the energy that built
up around supporting their recent protest could now be turned toward
getting them off their death sentences and allowing them to prove their
innocence. Ironically, the improved conditions that they won through
hunger strike could help in this regard. Among their demands —
increased time outside of their cells, semi-contact visits, and equal
access to commissary — was the demand that they be allowed to access
legal databases like other death-sentenced prisoners, so that they could
work toward their appeals.
For now, this is most important to
Bomani Shakur. In a shocking recent decision, a district court judge
affirmed the recommendation of the magistrate against his petition for
habeas corpus without any discussion of the merits of the judgment.
Shakur believes that the judge made this seemingly rash judgment in
retaliation for his role in the hunger strike. Whether he has reason to
believe this or not, he and his counsel now have to turn to the Federal
Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. In real terms, what might have
been a further process of five years to execution now seems to have been
shortened to perhaps three. The US judicial system is strongly biased
against appeal, even in most egregious cases of injustice. So the
Lucasville Five now have a hard case to argue. It is a case where public
opinion and social movement may have more impact than the law, just as
public pressure seems to have played a decisive role in winning a
successful end to the hunger strike after such a short period.
Bomani
Shakur told Alice and Staughton Lynd that the denial of his habeas
petition by the district court makes him more determined and focused on
what he needs to do in the next few years. Activists and supporters in
Ohio and beyond will be asked to find the same kind of focus.
The Agreement That Ended the Hunger Strike
Denis O’Hearn, Director of Graduate Studies, Sociology Department, Binghamton University – SUNY.
