It Came Without Warning
I was talking to my wife, and all of a sudden these alarms start going off. This was, or was supposed to be, the smoke alarm. And I had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that someone had activated the sensor of the alarm by smoking in their cell. I heard something but you kind of — I discounted it. I saw people running and it was like a lot of noise cause these alarms are very very loud.
Lo and behold, after I finished talking to Wadiya, I, you know, walked back to the back of the block [ambient noise] and I heard this rushing sound. Guys began explaining and screaming and banging on their doors because water starts falling through the sprinkler system. And before long, it was coming out of the light circuits. It was coming from everywhere, especially in an area called the dorm, where about seven or eight guys, you know, sleep in a confined area. They were banging to open the door, and before you knew it, water was just everywhere, everywhere.
Every cell on the lower half of this block got some degree of water damage. I mean, it’s just, you know, people were rushing to pick up their papers off the floor. I got some, but I didn’t get all, and a good amount of mail and stuff like that got simply destroyed. It was exciting [chuckles], but it wasn’t that in a good way. It was something to experience.
It was so much water, in fact, that water was running out of the front door of the entire block. Some guys had about four inches deep. Some more. Some people lost typewriters because they were locked in their cell and pushing the button, and the guy at the desk was a rookie, and he was kind of afraid of opening people’s doors. And it was, it was, well, it was interesting, and as I said, not in a good way. I apologize for anyone if I don’t answer their mail right quickly, because I’m still trying to sort through stuff. But it was, it was the great flood of 2014.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
The Fletcher Rule
I speak today of a man on death row, a man known to many as “Two Guns.” For many, perhaps most, the words ‘death row’ and the nickname ‘Two Guns’ are all that needs be said, for taken together they paint a picture tinged with guilt. But this is not that case. Anthony Fletcher is his birth name and his nickname was his boxing name. The guns, his fists, which took him to the brink of greatness in the ring, where he fought and bested great fighters like Boom Boom Mancini and Livingstone Bramble, until 1993, when a Philadelphia jury convicted him of shooting a man whom Fletcher claimed was shot in self defense. Under today’s law, Fletcher would have been acquitted, if not charged at all, but this was ’93. In 2004 a Philadelphia judge granted him a new trial after a pathologist admitted he gave erroneous testimony at his trial as to whether a struggle occurred. In most states, that would have een the end of it, but not in Pennsylvania.
In 2007, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the new trial; used a dubious claim used at the original trial, false, misleading testimony, by medical examiner doctor Ian Hood, and reverse the post-conviction judge, reinstating a first degree murder conviction and a death sentence. Anthony “Two Guns” Fletcher was sent back to death row. If the mistaken pathologist and a crack-addled, so-called witness hadn’t presented false, misleading testimony in the first trial, there wouldn’t even have been a conviction!But there you are. In Pennsylvania, self defense isn’t self defense, if they don’t want it to be. In fact, jailhouse lawyers here think Two Guns got sent back to death row for the most greasy of reasons. He refused to plead guilty to third degree murder, and thereby allowing the DA to keep an unjust, unreliable conviction. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Chained As Children
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that mandatory life sentences for juveniles was a violation of the Constitution’s 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Ever since then, almost a dozen states have resolved how their state should address retroactivity issues, or whether this new constitutional rule applied to older cases. Six states have decided ‘Yes,’ including, for example, Texas and Mississippi, and three states, among them Pennsylvania, have ruled ‘No,’ meaning the new rule doesn’t apply to earlier cases.
That’s significant because Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any other state in the United States, some 462 at last count. And not surprisingly, Philadelphia leads the state’s other counties in t
he number of jailed juvenile lifers – 265. And recently, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that it would not hear appeals on the issue of juvenile retroactivity, so thousands of people, many of whom have been in prison for decades, with mandatory life sentences, remain in prison without chance or hope of parole. In that Miller v. Alabama case from 2012, the court majority reminded other members that children are still children. That lesson has not yet reached Pennsylvania. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Execution In Oklahoma
He tossed, he turned. He moaned, he burned. Clayton Lockett on the death gurney of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections spoke words, struggled, and reportedly kicked his legs for 43 minutes after a toxic cocktail was administered to him to kill him. That cocktail, an experimental mix of chemicals designed to stop his respiration, still his heart, and do so relatively painlessly, failed to do so, as he apparently never lost consciousness. Some 10 minutes after the execution was called off, Lockett’s heart went into arrest, a heart attack, and he left this life.
American death states are experimenting with various mixes because international chemical companies are now refusing to service the U.S. death penalty machine. Left to their own resources, they’re literally experimenting, and as the Lockett execution has demonstrated, they are doing it badly. The American way of death is sloppy. Their way bears an uncanny resemblance to torture. For in Lockett’s case, his veins reportedly burst from the pressure of the lethal IV. The U.S. death penalty system is torture: the psychological torture of sustained isolation in solitary confinement, and then after the soul is dead, the poisoning of the body — the American way of death. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Un-Free in America
For millions of people in America, life consists of day after day of repression in tiny cells under the unblinking eye of the state. It is a cruel irony that while public discourse is thick with words like freedom and liberty, the bodies and lives of millions are trapped within a system that only knows how to humiliate and exploit them. There really is a prison industrial complex, and those who deny it most are those who profit from it most. For like the Wizard of Oz, they dare not allow you to ‘peek behind the curtain.’ There, by political design and judicial fiat, you find unchecked, unbridled power wreaking havoc on the lives of the poor in the name of ‘corrections’.
What is their kind of corrections? Repression, pure and simple, from people doing lifetimes in prison holes to naked brutality under cover of state law. Thanks to the first “Black” president, Bill Clinton, it is virtually impossible to file and prove a civil rights lawsuit in court. For as Clinton demonstrated, it takes a neoliberal to respond to a wave of lawsuits by changing the rules to make filing even harder. Don’t change the conditions, just change the rules. That’s neoliberalism. Those rules are still the rules enforced today. For it matters not that there is a Black face in the White House, for truth be told, he doesn’t make the rules. The conditions, the life options, and even the post-prison possibilities are worse and worse for more and more people. That has not changed. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Dallas Five – Fighting For Their Lives
On April 10, 2010, a raid began at the Pennsylvania prison at Dallas. The raid was the targeting of men who filed complaints with the Human Rights Coalition and in federal courts. Several of the men, some of whom did file such complaints, anticipating violence against them, used their bed sheets to seal their cells and refused to come out of them unless they could meet with high ranking officials to report the violence and intimidation they faced. Guards in riot armor and helmeted tore through the sheets, sprayed tear gas or pepper spray, and beat the five men for their protests and then shipped them across the state of Pennsylvania.
Thus was born the Dallas Five, for after this nonviolent protest, the men faced criminal charges of riot and incitement, despite being locked in their cells under solitary confinement or ‘one man one cell,’ for 24 hours a day. The men, Andre Jacobs, Carrington Keys, Duane Peter, and Derrick Stanley have been waiting for nearly four years for trial. Their family and supporters are demanding that the charges be dropped. Trial is set for January 21, 2014.
Shandre Delaney, a mother of one of the men, is also an investigator for the Human Rights Coalition, in Pittsburgh. She’s authored articles on the Dallas Five and sent out petitions seeking dismissal. Luzerne County, where Dallas state prison sits, is a site now infamous for the Kids for Cash scandal when judges exploited hundreds of children for years to make money by locking them up. That’s where the trial, if there is a trial, will take place. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
The Outrageous American Norm
An Indian diplomat, Dr. Khobragade, charged with filing false employment records for her housekeeper is arrested, hauled into a U.S. marshal’s office, strip searched, and subsequently released. In India, the event raises quite a ruckus, and Indian nationalists express outrage amid calls for diplomatic retaliation against the Americans. It reminds us of the imprisonment and perp walk of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn after he was named the suspect in a rape of a Senegalese hotel maid some years ago. Both cases rest upon what has been normal standard operating procedure in American police practices: the humiliation of the accused.
In modern day America, the ground forces of police practice is largely aimed at Black and Brown people, those who have long been the subject of public humiliations. So much so, that such treatment has become normalized, just the way things are, here in the ‘land of the free.’ When foreigners experience the treatment that Americans go through every day, they’re shocked. The question is, why aren’t we?
The reason seems simple. America’s repressive, punitive and humiliating system is supported by media and the political classes. For such treatment is usually reserved for those already deprived of full social status – Blacks, the poor, and immigrants. For them, every day is humiliation, especially as the rich and the super rich accrue more and more power and more and more impunity is granted to the state.
Several months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that strip searches were proper, even for something as minor as a traffic stop. When a system becomes so drunk with power it can only expand outward, touching more and more people. Why should any of us be surprised? From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Scottsboro Boys
Alabama, 80 years after its racist persecution of nine Black men and teens, known collectively as the Scottsboro Boys, for trumped up charges of rape, has posthumously pardoned the men, finally clearing their names. Alabama’s Governor, Robert Bentley, said, “Today, the Scottsboro Boys have finally received justice.” Hooray. Huzzah. The Scottsboro Nine were, all but the youngest, sentenced to death by all white juries for a rape that never happened back in the 1930s. All of them are now dead, nearly a century after their railroading, and a part is justice.
It made me think of the Move Nine, members of the Move Organization, entering their 35th year for a crime that few seriously think they are guilty of. In 2058, will the future governor declare them pardoned and grant them symbolic justice? Justice delayed is still justice denied. From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
Children of Forever
It was long awaited, but when it came, it left many men in disbelief. “It” was a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the Commonwealth v. Cunningham case. The question posed was: Is the Miller v. Alabama opinion by the US Supreme Court limiting the application of life sentences to juveniles to be applied retroactively? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided recently that it does not.
Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any other state, indeed, any other jurisdiction in the world. Over 500 people were convicted as juveniles in state courts and sentenced to life terms. Now, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has shut those cages, perhaps forever. The Cunningham ruling was a four-three vote, meaning four in the majority and three in the minority, and even the Chief Justice Ron Castille was critical of the majority opinion, which he made a majority by voting with them, for not squarely addressing retroactivity.
It is clear from reading the Miller case that they were thinking of retroactivity for the majority; concurring, and dissenting opinions all address the 2500 juvenile lifer cases across the country. If it didn’t apply to them, why address it? But courts are ultimately political institutions, all the more so when it’s elected courts. Cunningham came just a few days before a statewide judicial retention election in which two state supreme court justices are running. Remember the saying, ‘law is simply politics by other means.’ Meanwhile, hundreds of people, some who were 13, 14, 15, or 16 when their crimes were committed, are sent back to eternity in a cage . From in prison nation. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
The World’s War
Some of us think of the issue of mass incarceration as a state problem, a national problem, or even a legal problem; the immense growth of the prison industrial complex is all of these things and more. It is a global problem, as we saw in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, when state prison guards — the most notorious of which hailed from Pennsylvania’s prison in Greene County, C.O. Charles Graner — who were also members of the U.S. Army Reserves. For there, the bulk of the torture and brutality against Iraqis was perpetrated by men and women who had civilian gigs in state prisons across America. Abu Ghraib almost singularly undermined the U.S. imperial mission in Iraq and erupted into scandal.
To be sure, America is the biggest incarcerator on earth, and the greatest damage, therefore, is to fellow Americans who live half lives where every option of social advancement is closed to them upon release – jobs, education, public housing and social benefits. In modern day America, a felony conviction is the latest version of The Scarlet Letter. It is the mark of Cain, meant to deter people from achievement and class assent. Law Professor Michelle Alexander argues that it is, as shown by the title of her recent book, The New Jim Crow, but it is more.
For dead, vast swaths of society desensitizes them so that this vast population of some three million people are out of sight, out of mind. They are today’s non-persons, merely a commodity for an industry that grows by leaps and bounds, providing jobs and job security for white rural districts, which have long ago lost their place in the realm of manufacturing.
This is the terrible link that keeps this non productive industry alive; economic interest. Years ago, such rural districts shunned and protested the placement of prisons in their midst. Now they beg for them. As manufacturers fled U.S. shores in search of ever lower labor costs after NAFTA’s 1994 passage, prisons became the biggest growth industry, producing the prison industrial complex. It is this complex of misery that must be undone, and only a mass movement can achieve it. For home is where the hatred is. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
