By Staughton Lynd
Summary So Far
So far, I
have been discussing the Lucasville uprising as a whole. I’ve asked:
Why should we doubt the accuracy of the trial court verdicts? What caused this rebellion, anyway? In what sense can these events be called
“tragic”?
Let’s sum up where we have arrived.
In Essay 1
we offered some examples of the unreliability of conclusions asserted by
prosecutors in trials after the end of the uprising. Particularly dramatic was the statement of
one of the prosecutors (now a state court judge), Daniel Hogan, that we
would never know “who hands-on killed
the corrections officer, [Robert] Vallandingham. . . . I don’t know.
And I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
How can the State of Ohio propose to execute three men (Siddique
Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, and James Were) for the murder of Officer
Vallandingham when it doesn’t even know who killed him?
Essay 2
focused on a confidential memorandum of the Correctional Institution Inspection
Committee, prepared in 1989 on the basis of dozens of letters and
interviews. Prisoners at SOCF, the CIIC
reported, “relayed fears and predictions of a major disturbance unlike any
ever seen in Ohio prison history.”
It seems that this was a prison that had “gone wrong” before the murder
of Beverly Jo Taylor in 1990 or Warden Tate’s refusal to consider alternative
means of testing for TB in 1993.
Finally,
Essay 3 quoted the testimony of Sergeant Howard Hudson, a member of the state’s
hostage negotiation team, who said that the authorities deliberately
stonewalled, that is, dragged out negotiations with the prisoners in
rebellion. The tragically mistaken
assumption of government negotiators was that “the more time goes on the
greater the chances for a peaceful resolution to the situation.”
Essay 3 also quoted from an
assessment of the rebellion by the union of correctional officers. The union asserted that a statement to the
media on the morning of April 14 by Tessa Unwin, a public information officer
for the state, “practically guaranteed the hostage death [because] the
inmates were almost forced to kill or maim a hostage.”
However, let’s be clear. The point of all this evidence of misconduct
or misjudgment by the authorities is not to argue that the prisoners in L-block
were innocent. The prisoners, as a body,
killed ten helpless human beings: nine fellow prisoners and a hostage
officer. The point is that the
authorities shared the responsibility for these deaths.
One might have hoped that,
recognizing this, ODRC and prisoner negotiators would have understood the
agreement that ended the ordeal as a starting point for resolution of the
problems that caused the rebellion.
What the 21-Point
Surrender Agreement Promised, and Why It Didn’t Happen
Unlike the 1971 uprising in Attica,
New York, when the armed forces of the State stormed the occupied recreation
yard and more than forty persons were killed, the Lucasville rebellion ended
with a negotiated agreement. An assault
force was assembled at Lucasville and an assault plan was drawn up. (See my Lucasville, revised edition,
p. 85.) But the assault never happened.
Instead,
after the death of Officer Vallandingham the authorities became serious about
negotiations. Gathering specifics from
the lists of demands set forth on the sheets prisoners hung out of L-block
windows, the authorities set forth what they would do about twenty-one of the
prisoners’ demands. Warden Tate signed
the document to indicate his agreement.
The document was then proffered to the three negotiators chosen by the
prisoners: Siddique Abdullah Hasan,
representing the Sunni Muslims; Anthony Lavelle of the Black Gangster
Disciples; and Jason Robb of the Aryan Brotherhood. In this way the authorities were able to
maintain the fiction that they were not “negotiating.”
The State
did a second thing. Attorney Niki
Schwartz of Cleveland had been involved in major litigation to correct
conditions of confinement at the “Old Mansfield” prison. (This is the prison used as a movie set in
the filming of The Shawshank Redemption.) ODRC general counsel Greg Trout called
Attorney Schwartz to ask him to assist in a peaceful settlement at
Lucasville. Attorney Schwartz agreed to
contribute what he could and was flown to SOCF on Sunday, April 18.
Later
Schwartz, as a witness in the trials of Jason Robb and Siddique Abdullah Hasan,
described his experiences. He said that
Trout had asked him to be an “attorney for the inmates, because the inmates had
asked for a lawyer.” State v. Robb, Tr.
at 5581. Once he arrived in Portsmouth,
Schwartz was told by prison officials that “they didn’t want me to negotiate to
try to improve the deal.” Id. at
5582.
Schwartz
testified that legally the authorities were not bound to honor an agreement
negotiated under duress, but he had taken the position that unless the
authorities were prepared to honor the 21-point agreement, he was unwilling to
go further. Id. at
5583-5584. The officials gave him their
word that they would honor the agreement.
They said, according to Schwartz:
“There’s a lot of things in there we should have been doing
anyway.” Id. at 5584.
The authorities asked Schwartz,
because he had dealt with the prison authorities in the past, to “vouch” for
the fact they intended to keep their word.
Id.; also State v. Sanders, Tr. at 5485-5487.
In retrospect, the State kept its
word with regard to many of the 21 points, but dramatically failed to honor the
two most important. (The 2l points appear in Lucasville, revised
edition, pp. 64-66, and Exhibit 1.)
These were Point 2:
“Administrative discipline and criminal proceedings will be fairly and
impartially administered without bias against individuals or groups,” and Point
14: “There will be no retaliatory
actions taken toward any inmate or groups of inmates or their property.”
It should also be noted
that even with regard to most of the other points, the State promised to do no
more than see what could be done. For
example, regarding the hated restriction that limited telephone calls to family
and friends to one five-minute call per year, the authorities responded
in Point 12: “Attempts will be made to
expedite current plans to install a new phone system.” As to the absence of “programs” for
self-improvement under Warden Tate’s Operation Shakedown, Point 13 vaguely
declared: “We will work to evaluate and
improve work and programmatic opportunities.”
Respecting interference with mail, prisoners were told in Point 15: “A complete review of all SOCF mail and
visiting policies will be undertaken.”
These are promises so
noncommittal that it is hard to imagine how prisoners could have filed
grievances or lawsuits alleging their violation.
However, the critical
provisions of the 21-point agreement (Points 2 and 14 prohibiting retribution
against alleged leaders) were not enforced for a reason that had nothing to do
with their wording. The residents of
Portsmouth, the county seat of Scioto County, were incensed about the murder of
Beverly Jo Taylor in 1990, which was repeated, so it seemed to them, by the
strangling of hostage officer Robert Vallandingham in 1993. In each case, as perceived by the local
population, a helpless hostage was brutally murdered by the person or persons
who had kidnapped them. It didn’t help
that the man who killed Ms. Taylor, a mentally-challenged inmate named Eddie
Vaughn, was black, as were the unnamed “Muslims” who, the prosecution told
juries, had killed Officer Vallandingham.
Eddie Vaughn was not
sentenced to death because of his mental limitations. After the April 1993 events, the community
demanded that someone should die for strangling Officer
Vallandingham. A petition was circulated
in southern Ohio. Addressed to the
governor, the president of the Ohio Senate, and the speaker of the Ohio House,
it was signed by approximately 26,000 persons.
A delegation presented the petition at the state capitol. The petition (Appendix 3 in Lucasville)
“request[ed] and demand[ed] that the present statute of the Death Penalty in
the State of Ohio be applied as the passers intended it to be.” Ohio’s capital punishment statute,
purporting to apply the law as declared by the Supreme Court of the United
States, had been adopted several years before but there had been no executions
pursuant to its provisions. The
petitioners insisted that the time to begin such executions was now. The public officials to whom it was
addressed, the petition concluded, “must accept their responsibility to carry
out the wishes of the Voters of the State of Ohio.”
In such an over-heated
atmosphere legal niceties were likely to be disregarded. It seems certain that persons who signed the
petition were members of the petit juries that convicted Orson Wells and Eric
Scales. Petition signers may also have
been among the members of the grand jury that issued capital indictments in the
summer of 1994. In November 2011, Chief
Judge Susan Dlott of the Southern District of Ohio ordered that the names of
those grand jurors be produced for Lucasville defense counsel in Hasan’s case.
How do passion and prejudice do
their work in the minds and hearts of prosecutors and jurors who have sworn to
be fair and impartial? Judge Hogan told
filmmaker Derrick Jones that he believed that serious misconduct during the
eleven days supposedly committed by members of the Aryan Brotherhood had been
ordered by the highest-ranking member of the group in L-block, Paul “Tramp”
Johnson. However, the judge continued,
AB members Jason Robb and George Skatzes had refused to “snitch” on Johnson. “They didn’t want to talk.” Accordingly, Hogan went on, he proceeded
against Robb and Skatzes, despite the fact that (so he said), “I don’t think
they were the ones actually running the show.”
A Rebuttal
The best rebuttal witnesses to this
oversimplified popular sentiment may be the hostage officers themselves.
We have already cited Siege in
Lucasville written by hostage officer Larry Dotson in cooperation with Gary Williams. Dotson refers to a lawsuit filed by the
“union recommended law firm” of Carr and Sherman. The pleadings and court orders in this
litigation have recently come into the possession of the author.
The plaintiffs in Case No.
94-05290, in the Court of Claims of Ohio, were Robert Vallandingham’s widow,
Peggy Vallandingham, and hostage officers John Kemper, Richard Buffington,
Darrold Clark, Kenneth Daniels, Harold Fraley, Conrad Nagel, Jeff Ratcliff,
Robert Schroeder, Larry Dotson, and their families. Officer Michael Hensley and his family were
added as plaintiffs when the complaint was amended in April 1995. Officers Rodney Pennington and Michael Stump,
who were “seriously injured” although not taken hostage, were also
plaintiffs. Defendants were the Ohio
Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and three administrative agencies
with oversight over the construction of public buildings.
According to the Complaint:
۰
The ODRC “knew or should have
known of the prisoners’ plan to riot before its occurrence” thereby
intentionally and/or negligently placing Plaintiffs in a position of known danger.
۰
When the uprising began, the ODRC failed to protect hostage Plaintiffs
by not following its own policies and procedures.
۰
The ODRC was responsible for making the critical decisions in
negotiations, and despite knowing “that the inmate captors knew their [that is,
Defendants’] negotiation protocols,” acted deliberately, negligently and/or
with wantonness and recklessness and/or with negligence. Defendants’ acts and omissions in
negotiations included “refusal to negotiate in good faith.”
۰
The ODRC allowed “false public information” to be disseminated that was
“highly probable and/or foreseeable to result in serious bodily injury or death
to the hostages.” This is a reference to
Ms. Unwin’s statement on April 14.
۰
On or about April 11, 1993, several officers had sought refuge in “safe
havens” at the end of the cell-blocks as they had been trained to do by the
ODRC. It had been represented to the
officers that these areas “were entry proof” due to their construction with
steel bars but this proved not to be the case.
Officer Dotson tells us in his
memoirs that before this lawsuit was filed, “It’s almost like they were only
being kind to us so that we wouldn’t sue them.
When we did, it was like ‘the gloves came off’.” Gary Williams, Siege in Lucasville (revised
edition), p. 167.
Nevertheless, rather than
contesting the truth of the allegations in the officers’ Court of Claims
lawsuit, ODRC and the other defendants settled before trial. The amounts of money allocated to
particular plaintiffs (one third of which went to their lawyers) included the
following:
Peggy Vallandingham . . . . . . . .
. . $850,000
Kenneth Daniels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150,000
Richard Buffington . . . . . . . .
. . . . 120,000
Darrold Clark . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 250,000
John Kemper . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . 380,000
Conrad Nagel . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 35,000
Larry Dotson . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 120,000
Jeff Ratcliff . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . 200,000
Robert Schroeder . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . 80,000
Rodney Pennington . . . . . . . . .
. . . . 55,000
Harold Fraley . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . 50,000
Michael Stump . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 25,000
Michael Hensley . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 300,000
In addition, according to Officer Dotson, ODRC settled for
$4.1 million a class action filed on behalf of three groups of inmates: those who were killed, those who were
injured, and those who lost property.
Gary Williams, Siege in Lucasville (revised edition), p. 240.
The
revised edition of Officer Dotson’s book offers additional testimony from
prison staff and official investigations as to the authorities’ share of
responsibility for what happened. Gary
Williams, Siege in Lucasville (revised edition), pp. 204-205. Among his observations are these:
۰ “The rotary telephone system at SOCF
effectively impeded prompt communication of the disturbance to key
institutional staff who were not on-site.”
Warden Tate was not notified “until two hours after the initial
disturbance.”
۰ “Tactical command was not effectively
established and organized by SOCF during the first two hours, thereby
forestalling and preempting an early opportunity to rescue five correctional
officers and one inmate who had taken refuge in the rear stairwells of L-2,
L-4, and L-5.”
۰ “The Disturbance Control Team was not
assembled until two hours into the siege (5:00 p.m.); the SOCF Tactical
Response Team was not assembled until 5:45 p.m.; . . . inmates had erected a
barricade at the lower crash gate into L-corridor, thereby negating any real
possibility for launching a successful assault on L-block.”
The last sentence of this
book’s revised edition, on page 271, offers the final judgment that ODRC “top-level administrators . . . lit the fuse
that led to the explosive riot at SOCF.”
Conclusion
and Next Steps
Accordingly, as these essays proceed
to examine the conduct of individual defendants and the integrity of their
trials, I ask readers to avoid simplistic judgments. The world is not neatly divided into Good
Guys and Bad Guys. There is no DNA
evidence that might throw conclusive light on what happened in L-block. It would certainly be misguided to say,
“There is no reason to doubt the prosecutor’s version of what happened.” But it should be equally unacceptable to say,
“I have known defendant so-and-so for years and I cannot imagine him as a
murderer.” The case for Lucasville
Amnesty can only be made by detailed assessment of the facts.
However, the truth is not altogether
inaccessible. In particular, it will be
profitable to compare what Witness X testified in one trial with what he
testified in others, an exercise too time-consuming for most defense counsel.
We shall begin, one by one, to
examine the trials of individual defendants that followed the end of the
uprising.
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