Friends and colleagues,
Greetings.
As you may know, there have been two AP articles
this week on the need for media access to prisoners found guilty of alleged
misconduct in the Lucasville uprising of April 1993.
The second article, below, informs readers that
four Lucasville defendants at the Ohio State Penitentiary, S.A. Hasan, Keith
LaMar, and Jason Robb (sentenced to death) and Gregory Curry (sentenced to life
imprisonment), will begin a hunger strike tomorrow morning, Thursday April 11,
twenty years from the day the 1993 rebellion began. The sole issue of this
particular action is the demand for media access.
The article also contains excerpts of an interview
the AP reporter conducted, over the telephone, with S.A. Hasan.
I have been emphasizing to reporters and others
that there are two important reasons for media access. The first is to
humanize the prisoner. This was dramatically achieved in an event at
Youngstown State University on April 3, when Keith LaMar spoke to the
audience by telephone while pictures of him were projected on a screen.
The second reason for face-to-face interviews is
that it gives the prisoner a way to contribute to the search for truth about his
alleged crimes. Other means of communication, such as writing a letter or
making a telephone call, cannot achieve what is possible when a journalist and a
prisoner can speak face to face, permitting the reporter to ask follow-up
questions as in a courtroom cross-examination.
There is an important legal opinion on this
issue. In Saxbe v. Washington Post Co., 417 U.S. 847 (1984), the
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia remanded the case to the District
Court with the request that the lower court determine "the extent to which the
accurate and effective reporting of news has a critical dependence upon the
opportunity for private personal interviews." The District Court took
testimony from six expert witnesses, including Arthur Lehman, counsel for
the New York State Special Commission on Attica. This evidence
persuaded the District Court "to find as a fact that the absolute interview ban
[at issue in the case] precludes accurate and effective reporting on prison
conditions and inmate grievances."
When the case went up to the United States Supreme
Court, a ban on interviews in federal prisons was found to be lawful, despite
the holding of the District Court. But there is a powerful dissent by
Justices Powell, Brennan and Marshall, from which I take my summary of the
District Court proceedings.
I also recommend a law review article: Alana M.
Sitterly, "Silencing Death Row Inmates: How Hammer v. Ashcroft Needs a
Rational Basis for its Rational Basis," George Mason University Civil Rights Law
Journal (Spring 2011). The basic point of this article is that a court
should not speculate as to the reasons why a prison administration might
have prohibited interviews. The prison administration should be
obliged to say why it forbade interviews and to offer evidence in the record for
this decision.
Finally, I observe that the Lucasville prisoners
are speaking out more and more, and that at last we are beginning to build a
case in the "court of public opinion."
I shall send the article and this message to Hasan,
Bomani, and Jason, as well as Gregory Curry, George Skatzes, and James Were, by
regular United States mail.
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