Double amputee, beaten, tortured and terrorized for over a decade in Virginia’s prisons.
The inhumanity of Virginia’s prisons knows no limits. The experiences of Neil Lyness also known as Turbo, proves the case. Neil is a double amputee who lost his left arm and left leg in a motorcycle accident. He’s been confined since 2012 where he spent 28 months in a Virginia Beach jail before being transferred into the Virginia prison system. His first two years in jail was spent in solitary confinement, because jail officials refused to accommodate his needs as a disabled person. His treatment in Virginia’s prisons, however, has been far worse.
Neil began his prison time in minimal security facilities where he should have remained, but instead, he was targeted with repeated abuses as his security level shot up and he was repeatedly transferred, until ultimately, he found himself at Virginia’s notorious supermax, Red Onion State Prison. In each subsequent facility, he was abused. His first stop was Deerfield Correctional Center. From there, he went to Lunenburg, then St. Brides, but three guards surrounded him on an outside boulevard, lifted his wheelchair and dumped him onto the pavement, causing an injury. When his mother, Rhonda Lyness, pressed charges for the assault, his security level was increased and he was moved to a prison in Powhatan County, where his mistreatment continued and security level was enhanced yet again. He was next transferred to Virginia’s notorious maximum security, River North Correctional Center, with no belongings, where he was kept in isolation for 108 days, and from there to Red Onion for an additional 10 months in isolation in 2024.
At each stop Neil was flooded with trumped up disciplinary infractions and suffered physical abuses, Americans with Disabilities Act violations, and medical neglect as his health deteriorated and his mother agonized over the imminent danger his life was in at the hands of those charged with protecting him. His visitation and telephone rights were stripped away for years. Rhonda hadn’t seen her son for two to three years for the mere act of painting decorations on the back of his personal custom wheelchair, which officials washed right off, Neil was given an infraction for destroying state property and maliciously fined $5,000 in restitution for the full cost of the wheelchair.
In latter 2024, during the same period that numerous prisoners set themselves on fire at Red Onion in desperate efforts to be transferred away from its inhumane conditions, seven Red Onion guards took Neil’s wheelchair, prosthetic leg, and pepper sprayed him in the face and put a mask over his head and stripped him and beat him while he was on the gurney. They then strapped him to a steel bed frame in an isolation cell for over a week, where he was left to urinate and defecate on himself, as has been done to countless prisoners at Red Onion for decades. Only because of Rhonda’s unrelenting persistence in advocating her son’s cause, as she added her voice to the prison advocacy group UPROAR, Uniting Prisoners Relatives Organizing Against Repression, was Neil recently interstate transferred where she finally got to talk to him.
During that reunion, Neil reported that he had not been provided dental repair and almost all of his teeth had been removed. A man of six foot three inches tall, Neil’s weight dropped in Virginia custody from 200 pounds to a mere 154 pounds. With him now relocated through the Interstate Compact program, both Neil and Rhonda are relieved for the first time in years of living in constant terrorism being killed by Virginia guards, and although he is in a safer place now, multitudes of abused Virginia prisoners and their loved ones continue to live in fear of their own imminent violent death at the hands of Virginia guards, which UPROAR continues to challenge and protest. Join us. Support us. This is Kevin Rashid Johnson coming to you from within America’s Gulag Archipelago. Dare to struggle, dare to win. All power to the people.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
