By Staughton Lynd
Note: This is Essay 7 in the series I have been
writing on “Re-Examining Lucasville.”
Two persons, one an experienced journalist and the other a prisoner at
Lucasville in April 1993, have said the same thing. They believe the main idea that should tie
our thoughts together is: THEY DON’T
KNOW WHO DID IT!
That is,
five men have been sentenced to death for murdering ten victims during the
occupation of L-block, but the authorities (the State of Ohio, the Lucasville
Special Prosecutor, the several Assistant Prosecutors, and the Ohio State
Highway Patrol) do not know who actually committed the homicides.
Instead,
the authorities have gone after the men who they believe were “leaders” of the
eleven-day occupation of L-block. They
have been able to get away with their claims because of the Ohio doctrine of
“complicity,” which allows courts to sentence people to death if they were
present at the scene of criminal conduct or were otherwise involved.
It was the prosecution’s burden to
convince juries, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Five should be found
guilty of the murders that took place during the rebellion. Much has been said about the homicides in
previous essays. Essays still to come
will examine in very great detail how I believe the State constructed a false
explanation of the murder that most concerned the public: the murder of hostage officer Robert
Vallandingham. For now, I shall gather
scattered references to the several homicides from the different essays, and
show that the State either did not know who did the killings, or knew, but
needed the actual killer as a witness and so blamed someone else.
Who Did the Murders?
Here is a
summary of the State’s case concerning the different murders for which the Five
have been convicted, and why these narratives should not be believed because
the State does not really know who did the killing.
The Deaths of Depina, Svette, Vitale, Staiano and Weaver. The first fatalities were among prisoners who had been placed in cells in L-block for their own protection because they might be thought to be “snitches.”
How permission to carry out these killings was obtained from Muslims in positions of authority remains a mystery.
Stacey Gordon testified in various trials that he was one of three Muslims who had planned the occupation, and that he was a “security amir” with particular responsibility for L-6.
Yet as the “death squad” went from cell to cell in L-6, dragging out men imprisoned there and ruthlessly killing them, Gordon, according to his own testimony, watched from the upper tier of the pod without interfering.
Keith LaMar was tried and convicted as leader of the death squad. But there is reason to believe that Gordon himself may have played that role. Muslims Leroy Elmore and Edward Julious have stated in affidavits that they saw Gordon enter L-6 at the head of a group of masked and armed men; demand that a prisoner who was operating the console (the electronic mechanism that opened and closed cell doors) open the cells where supposed snitches had been confined; and threaten the man at the console that he would be harmed himself if he did not comply. Tony Taylor, a prosecution witness, testified that Gordon went down the corridor of L-6 from cell to cell with other members of the death squad. James Edinbaugh, who witnessed the killings but whose testimony was withheld from defense counsel, said that he witnessed the murders and that LaMar didn’t do anything.
Weaver was killed later. Prisoners who stayed on the yard after the uprising began, or who returned to the yard after briefly entering L-block to check on their property, were ordered into K-block. There they were stripped naked and confined ten men to a cell. Under these conditions, someone or some ones in one of the K-block cells strangled prisoner Dennis Weaver.
The prosecution ascribed Weaver’s death to Keith LaMar. But the prosecution withheld from LaMar’s defense counsel the summaries of interviews with other men in the cell that the interviewing officers entered into the prosecution’s computer database. The defense has had no opportunity to examine how agents of the State may have induced prisoners to shape their trial testimony. There is a strong possibility that LaMar was singled out because he tried to persuade everyone in the cell not to cooperate with Highway Patrol interviewers.
The Death of Earl Elder. George Skatzes was found guilty of the murder
of prisoner Earl Elder, and sentenced to death, for allegedly directing Rodger
Snodgrass to enter cell L-6-60 where Elder was confined and stab him to
death. Both Snodgrass and another
prosecution witness, Timothy Williams, testified that the weapon Snodgrass
carried resembled an ice pick and made a small, round hole. However, the medical examiner (Dr. Larry
Tate) said that the fatal blows were struck by an instrument with a wide blade;
a small piece of glass was found in the lethal wounds; and prisoner Eric Girdy
later came forward to say that he had helped to kill Elder using a weapon made
from a piece of broken glass in one of the officers’ restrooms. Girdy also stated under oath that Skatzes was
not present and had nothing to do with Elder’s death.
Although Girdy was indicted and
found guilty of Elder’s murder, prosecutors have made no attempt to vacate this
portion of Skatzes’ sentence.
The Death of Officer
Vallandingham. There is general agreement that Officer Vallandingham was
murdered by prisoners in pod L-6 on the morning of April 15. Who were these murderers?
On January 18, 1996, prisoner
Alvin Jones (a.k.a. Mosi Paki) was tried before a prison administrative
body known as a Rules Infraction Board for being one of two men who killed
Officer Vallandingham. Jones was found
guilty. Sergeant Howard Hudson, the
chief investigator of the Lucasville murders for the State, signed a summary of
his own witness testimony to the R.I.B. including the statement: “[Kenneth] Law took himself out of act
& replaced himself with inmate Darnell Alexander.” Thus, as of 1996,
the State identified Officer Vallandingham’s hands-on killers as Alvin Jones
and Kenneth Law.
On February 24, 2004, however,
Chief Lucasville Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier and Assistant Prosecutor William
Breyer filed a “Motion to Dismiss Defendant’s Petition to Vacate” in the
Skatzes case wherein they outlined a theory that Carlos Sanders had ordered
James Were to supervise the killing of Officer Vallandingham, and stated on
page 26 of the brief that “Inmates Law and Allen were the other two
participants.” “Allen” was Cecil
Allen, another Lucasville defendant.
Thus, the State of Ohio has
identified four different men--Alvin
Jones, Kenneth Law, Cecil Allen, and (in place of Law) Darnell Alexander--as
possible candidates for the two men who killed Officer Vallandingham.
In 2010, documentary filmmaker
Derrick Jones interviewed Daniel Hogan, who prosecuted Jason Robb and Skatzes
and is now a state court judge. Hogan
told Jones on tape: “I don’t know that
we will ever know who hands-on killed the ndCorrections Officer,
Vallandingham.” Later Mr. Jones asked former prosecutor Hogan: “ When it comes to Officer Vallandingham, who
killed him?” and Mr. Hogan replied: “I don’t know.
And I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
Finally, it must be emphasized that
Ohio law requires that in a homicide case there must be medical evidence as to
how the victim died and what caused the death.
As a result, the only truly objective evidence in the trials was the
evidence of medical examiners. The
testimony of several different medical examiners repeatedly clashed with the
prosecution’s narratives of the murders.
The medical examiner who testified in the trials of Jason Robb, George
Skatzes and Siddique Abdullah Hasan (formerly Carlos Sanders) for the murder of
Officer Vallandingham was Dr. Patrick Fardal, chief forensic pathologist and
deputy coroner for Franklin County. In
the Robb trial, the prosecution offered informant testimony that the men who
killed Officer Vallandingham stood on an object like a metal weight bar and rocked
back and forth on his neck, crushing the trachea. Dr. Fardal testified that there was “no
injury to the voice box or the trachea” and that “Mr. Vallandingham died solely
and exclusively as a result of ligature strangulation.” State v. Robb, Tr. at 4433, 4442.
Undaunted, the prosecution
presented the same lurid testimony about a weight bar in Hasan’s trial a year
later. Dr. Fardal once again stated
under oath that the cause of death was ligature strangulation, that the larynx
had not been crushed, and that he could say with a reasonable degree of
scientific certainty that there had been no rocking back and forth on
OfficerVallandingham’s neck by two men standing on a weight bar. State v. Sanders, Tr. at 4166-67,
7174-76.
The Death of Bruce Harris. Prisoner Bruce Harris was killed on the
last day of the occupation, at about the same time that other prisoners killed
David Sommers (see below).
Harris was apparently a somewhat
mentally challenged individual who had been locked in a cell on the upper tier
of L-6. On April 21, the last day of the
occupation, the Muslims conducted religious services on the corridor of the
pod. Harris screamed obscenities from
above. He was told to be quiet several
times. He persisted in interrupting the
others. Finally, several men climbed up
to his cell and killed him.
Hasan and Were were indicted for
the murder but their juries found them Not Guilty.
Stacey Gordon was a valuable State
witness in trials of other homicides.
He admitted that he took part in
murdering prisoner Bruce Harris but was never indicted.
He was indicted for trying to kill prisoner Fryman and for
assaulting two correctional officers. In
a 1994 plea deal, the more serious charges were dropped. Gordon was released from prison a few years ago.
The Death of David Sommers. Skatzes and Robb were found guilty and
sentenced to death for the aggravated murder of prisoner David Sommers.
The prosecutor argued that a number
of prisoners including Skatzes had stabbed, strangled, and battered the
victim. But the medical examiner (Dr.
Leopold Buerger) testified that Sommers had been killed by a single, massive
blow to the head, struck by a blunt instrument such as a baseball bat.
The testimony of prosecution
witness Snodgrass, as to where Skatzes was and what he did when, was
inconsistent with the testimony of the medical examiner. Snodgrass testified that as Sommers lay face
down on the floor, Skatzes stood behind him and hit him with a baseball bat. Dr. Buerger testified that the fatal blow had
been struck from the front, apparently when Sommers was in a sitting position.
Snodgrass also testified that
Skatzes had struck the first in a series of blows that killed Sommers. Dr. Buerger’s expert medical opinion was that
the massive blow that crushed Sommers’ skull and caused his death was the last
and final act of aggression.
Moreover, the prosecution in a
subsequent separate trial sought and achieved the conviction of another
prisoner, Aaron Jefferson, for striking the same blow! Once more, Dr. Buerger testified. State v. Jefferson, Tr. at 267-68, 275, 283. Again he insisted that the cause of death was
one single massive blow to the head.
Asked whether the fatal injuries could have been the result of multiple
blows, the doctor pointed to a picture of the head and told the jury that all
the underlying skull fractures were the result of “just that one blow.”
A bloody baseball bat found across
the corridor from the shower where Sommers’ body was found was destroyed by
order of the chief Lucasville prosecutor, Mark Piepmeier.
Robb and Skatzes were found guilty of the
murder of David Sommers.
The prosecution’s story was that a
group of Aryans including Robb went to L-3 with the intent of killing prisoners
Creager, Copeland and Newell, who they thought had planned a coup within the
coup to take leadership of the rebellion away from its initial spokespersons.
Muslim prisoners had locked the
three men in cells for their protection, according to the State. Robb was allegedly dispatched to bring the
three to L-7 so that they could be killed.
However, according to a prosecution witness, Creager and Copeland had
converted to the Muslim faith and their co-religionists would not release them.
Accordingly, when Robb returned to
L-7 after speaking to the Muslims, someone—perhaps Snodgrass, perhaps Jesse
Bocook—supposedly said, “What about that bitch Sommers?” David Sommers had monitored operation of the
telephone by means of which Skatzes and others had conducted their negotiations
with the authorities. The prosecution’s
theory was that Sommers had to be killed because he knew too much.
Then came a bizarre link in the
cause and effect proposed by the prosecutors.
Robb, it was said, was sent to L-2 with the task of luring Sommers to
L-7 so that he could be killed.
But the evidence at trial was that Sommers
had chased Robb to pod L-7! And Robb
was never alleged to have touched Sommers or to have been anywhere near
Sommers when he was killed.
Nor was there any solid
evidence a specific intent on Jason Robb’s part to harm or murder David
Sommers. In its totality, the evidence
of Robb’s intent was a statement from the ever-present Stacey Gordon to the
effect that he heard Robb and Sanders discussing the need to silence Sommers as
the two left a meeting. Gordon could not
remember the day or date of the meeting.
Gordon said that the meeting involved only Lavelle, Sanders and Robb
although no other witness testified that there had ever been such a
meeting. Nonetheless, the trial court
concluded: “On the last day of the riot
. . . Carlos Sanders and Robb ordered the killing of David Sommers.
What Did the Five Actually Do?
Three of the five men
sentenced to death and awaiting execution were, in fact, leaders in seeking and
bringing about a peaceful settlement.
Siddique Abdullah Hasan. It is true that Hasan took part in planning
what he hoped would be a brief and peaceful occupation of L-6 to protest Warden
Tate’s intention of injecting prisoners with a substance containing phenol, a
form of alcohol, to test for TB. Hasan
had brought to the Warden’s attention a letter from Muslim religious
authorities in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, condemning the test as contrary to
the Islamic religion. His counsel also
sought to call as a witness at his trial a prisoner who, at a different Ohio
prison, had been tested for TB by a different method.
Moreover, after the disturbance
began, Hasan took pains to cause a number of prisoners who he thought might be
suspected “snitches” to be locked in cells for their own protection.
Finally, Hasan was one of three men
who negotiated a peaceful surrender of the approximately 400 prisoners in
L-block, as well as the release of the hostages still being held.
George Skatzes. In the early hours of the rebellion,
Skatzes made sure that a severely wounded prisoner (John Fryman) and three
severely wounded correctional officers (Harold Fraley, John Kemper, and Robert
Schroeder) were placed where they could be retrieved by the authorities so as
to receive medical attention.
On Monday, April 12, Skatzes was
one of two men who went out on the yard to attempt to begin settlement
negotiations.
From Tuesday, April 13 through
Thursday, April 15, Skatzes communicated with representatives of the
authorities by telephone in an effort to arrange a peaceful resolution. On the evening of April 14, Skatzes and
prison negotiator Dave Burchett thought they had arrived at a basis for
settlement. After that understanding was
rejected by a committee of prisoner representatives the next morning, Skatzes
again went on the telephone, pleading with the authorities to turn water and
electricity back on in L-block so as to avert the murder of a hostage officer.
On the evening of April 15, Skatzes
accompanied correctional Officer Darrold Clark to the yard, where Clark was
released. Skatzes then made a radio
address in which he sought to explain the prisoners’ concerns and stressed a
desire to avoid more “unnecessary murders.”
At Skatzes’ trial, Officer Jeff Ratcliff
testified that Skatzes had saved his life.
Jason Robb. Robb was found guilty of the aggravated
murder of Officer Vallandingham on the basis of a taped transcript of the
prisoners’ meeting on the morning of April 15 which, in fact, did not decide to
kill a guard.
Robb, like Hasan, was one of the three
men who negotiated a peaceful surrender.
Attorney Niki Schwartz testified at Robb’s trial about the significant
contribution Robb had made to averting a bloodbath like that which ended the
Attica uprising. Schwartz told Robb’s
jury that Jason
deserved a large part of the credit for the
peaceful resolution of . . . the riot, that he had stuck his neck out as a lead
negotiator, that he had been selfless in negotiating, not trying to . . .
feather his own nest, but generally negotiated on behalf of the inmates, that
his concerns were legitimate ones, that he was reasonable in . . . accepting
things that couldn’t be changed or negotiated or wouldn’t be agreed to by the
other side.
At Attica in 1971, armed agents of
the state stormed the occupied recreation yard and more than forty human beings
-- hostage correctional officers as well as prisoners -- were killed.
At
Lucasville in 1993, after an occupation roughly three times as long as at
Attica, ten people died.
On Singling Out Leaders.
Thus
our generalization stands: The State
does not know who did the murders, and so they targeted five men whom they
considered leaders and convicted them for aggravated murder on the basis of the
doctrine of “complicity.”
The
prisoners in rebellion saw it coming. On
the bedsheets that they hung out the windows of L-block they demanded: “No selection of supposed leaders!” In their telephone negotiations the prisoners
declared: “There must not be any
singling out or selection of any inmate or group of leaders as supposed leaders
in this alleged riot.” And in the list
of 21 demands agreed to by the authorities as the basis for surrender, and
signed by Warden Tate, Point No. 2 stated explicitly: “Administrative discipline and criminal
proceedings will be fairly and impartially administered without bias against
individuals or groups.”
But from
the very first moments after the surrender, the authorities, whether
correctional officers or prosecutors, were intent to blame everything on
supposed leaders.
John Fryman
was a prisoner who was assaulted by other prisoners and almost killed as the
rebellion began. He was no friend of the
insurrectionists. Confined to the prison
infirmary after the surrender, Fryman was accosted by correctional
officers. He later stated in an
affidavit:
They made it clear that they wanted the
leaders. They wanted to prosecute Hasan,
George Skatzes, Lavelle, Jason Robb, and another Muslim whose name I don’t
remember. They had not yet begun their
investigation but they knew they wanted
those leaders. I joked with them
and said, “You basically don’t care what I say as long as it’s against these
guys.” They said, “Yeah, that’s it.”
Another
prisoner in the infirmary who had no reason to make up testimony favorable to
riot participants was Emanuel “Buddy” Newell.
He was one of three men whom the Aryans may have wanted to assault on
the last day of the occupation, and was actually assaulted with intent to kill
by Rodger Snodgrass. But Newell states
under oath, in another affidavit, that as he too lay in the infirmary after the
surrender, Lieutenant James Root, lead investigator Sergeant Howard Hudson, and
Troopers Randy McGough and Cary Sayers talked with him. According to Newell:
These officers said, “We want Skatzes. We want Lavelle. We want Hasan.” They also said, “We know they were
leaders. We want to burn their ass. We want to put them in the electric chair for
murdering Officer Vallandingham.”
Similarly,
Hasan’s prosecutor told the jury that the entire sequence of events between
April 11 and April 21 should be blamed on Hasan. Hasan’s defense counsel were not permitted to
present evidence as to the causes of the prisoner rebellion at SOCF. No such restriction was imposed on counsel
for the State. Prosecutor Gerald
Krumpelbeck began his opening statement to the jury in State v. Sanders
as follows:
Ladies and gentlemen, let
me introduce you to the riot at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility of
Easter Day, April 11, 1993.
The
evidence will show, to begin with, that this riot is misnamed. This riot was the idea of one man. This riot was planned by one man. This riot was organized by one man.
In closing
argument in the same trial, co-prosecutor Richard Gibson sounded the same
theme: “Whose riot was this? . . . Who called for this riot? . . . Ladies and gentlemen, first and foremost,
this was his riot.”
Testifying in Robb’s trial, Attorney Schwartz concluded that
implementation of the assurance in Point Two of the settlement agreement that
criminal prosecutions would be fair had been “an absolute disaster.”
Shared
Responsibility
The essence of the State’s approach to what happened
at Lucasville is 1) not knowing who really committed the murders, and so 2)
singling out “leaders” as responsible for everything done by anyone.
This is guilt by association. It is scapegoating. A new capital punishment
law had been enacted by the state legislature several years before but there
had been no executions pursuant to its provisions. After the uprising, about 26,000 residents of
southern Ohio signed petitions and form letters demanding that the capital
punishment statute of Ohio “be applied.”
Investigators and prosecutors were under heavy pressure to convict and
punish somebody.
In reality, both sides, the prisoners and the authorities,
share responsibility for what happened.
Warden
Tate took the unnecessarily rigid position that Muslim prisoners should be
injected for TB in the manner he had decided, even though there were other
methods, equally acceptable from a medical point of view, one of which had been
used in another Ohio prison.
The Warden
left SOCF undermanned for the Easter weekend even though he had been warned of
a possible disturbance, and failed adequately to inform those in charge of
predictable trouble.
It took an
inexplicably long time for forces of the State to mobilize a response when the
prisoners took over L-block. There is
every reason to believe that the uprising could have been ended quickly,
without bloodshed, had the authorities acted promptly.
The
so-called “safewells” in each pod of L-block in which several officers took
refuge proved not to be safe from assault by prisoners.
Proceeding
under a mistaken theory that the longer the siege, the less likelihood there
would be that hostages would be harmed, the authorities deliberately
stalled.
Following
an equally erroneous strategy of making life in L-block as difficult as
possible, the authorities turned off electric power and water for that part of
the prison.
Finally, Ms. Unwin’s unfortunate remark on
April 14 that the prisoners’ threat
to kill a guard, written on
a bedsheet, was a “standard threat” and “nothing new,” was perceived in
retrospect by both prisoners and hostage officers in L-block to have been the
incident that triggered Officer Vallandingham’s murder. Indeed, the union’s
written report on the uprising stated that Ms. Unwin’s comment “practically
guaranteed the hostage death [because] the inmates were almost forced to kill
or maim a hostage.”
This is not to deny or de-emphasize the fact that several
prisoners, most of them presently unknown, carried out ten brutal improvised
executions of defenseless human beings.
Whatever
entrance to this maze is chosen by an investigator, one comes in the end to a
tangle of shared responsibilities.
To say, in
the face of the evidence, that the present sentences should be carried out,
that five men should be executed and a dozen others serve what may amount to
the rest of their lives behind bars, when in truth the State does not know who
did the killings, or is concealing their identities, would be stubborn and
irresponsible.
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