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This excerpt is from a forthcoming book by Staughton Lynd, who requested portions of his manuscript be included in issues of the Free Press. Lynd, along with his wife Alice, have a lifetime of social justice activism. Staughton directed the Freedom Schools of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964. He was one of the first Americans to visit and write about North Vietnam during the war in the winter of 1965-66. Staughton and Alice are retired lawyers in Niles, Ohio. Temple University Press plans to publish this exposé on the Lucasville uprising in August 2004.
Prosecutors have called it “the longest prison riot in United States history.”1 More accurately, the Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) refers to “the longest prison siege in U.S. history where lives were lost.” A 1987 rebellion at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta seems to have lasted a few hours longer.2
The uprising took place in April 1993 in Lucasville, Ohio, a small community just north of the Ohio River. Two populations, approximately equal in number, confronted one another there. On the one hand were the maximum security prisoners at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF), mostly black, mostly from cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland. On the other hand was the all-white population of the town. Almost everyone in Lucasville worked at the facility or knew someone who did.3
In the course of the eleven-day occupation, one correctional officer and nine prisoners were murdered by prisoners.
My wife Alice Lynd and I were living in northern Ohio at the time. Those eleven days in April 1993 coincided with the much-publicized siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. We were barely aware of the Lucasville disturbance.
In 1996, my wife and I learned that a supermaximum security (or “supermax”) prison was being built in Youngstown. Alice organized a community forum at a church near the site to explore the question, What is a supermax prison? Jackie Bowers from Marion, Ohio testified about the experience of 23-hour-a-day isolation. She is the sister of George Skatzes, one of the five men condemned to death after the Lucasville events.
Alice and I became acquainted with “Big George,” whom at this writing we have visited monthly for seven years. We became increasingly convinced of his innocence and volunteered to assist his post-conviction counsel. As retired attorneys, we had more time than busy practicing lawyers to read 5,000 or 6,000 page transcripts. Little by little we came to be researchers for several of the Lucasville Five defense teams.
Two things caught my attention from the outset.
First, there has been an extraordinary degree of solidarity among the five men condemned to death. They have shared legal materials to a greater extent than have their attorneys. They have expressed concern about one another’s health problems. Together they have engaged in a series of hunger strikes protesting their burdensome conditions of confinement. Yet two of the five were at the time of the uprising members of the Aryan Brotherhood, an organization thought to endorse white supremacy, and the other three are African Americans. I sensed a dynamic quite different from the unchanging — even unchangable — racism that many historians have recently ascribed to white workers in the United States.
Second, emotions in southern Ohio have run so strongly about the Lucasville events that truth has gotten lost in the shuffle. The Columbia Journalism Review published an article about the irresponsible speculations of the media during the eleven days. According to the Review:
Glaring mistakes were reported as fact, and were never corrected. Reporters . . . vied for atrocity stories. They ran scary tales — totally false, it was later found — that spread panic and paranoia throughout the region.4
Among the examples recounted of bad reporting about the Lucasville uprising were these:
Six days into the riot a front-page story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, citing anonymous sources, reported that along with seven inmate deaths 19 other people in the prison had been killed, including “some pretty barbarous mutilations of the dead.”
A reporter for Channel 4 told viewers that as many as 172 bodies were piled up in the prison. This body count turned out to be a head count of inmates in one of the blocks not involved in the riot.
The Akron Beacon Journal reported about the murder of Officer Robert Vallandingham “that his eyes had been gouged out, that his back, arms and legs had been broken, and that his tongue had been cut out.” Not one of these details was accurate.5
Even on the 10th anniversary of the uprising, in April 2003, media coverage in Ohio dealt almost exclusively with persons outside prison. The highest award given to Ohio correctional officers for bravery was renamed for Officer Vallandingham; his widow Peggy Vallandingham accepted the Vallandingham Gold Star Award for Valor in his name; and flags at Ohio prisons flew at half mast. News stories conveyed next to nothing about the men on Death Row.
This was not wholly the fault of the media. Applying what appears to be a permanent policy, in mid-February 2003 ODRC Director Reginald Wilkinson informed a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch that “no inmates convicted of riot crimes will be permitted to speak to” reporters.6
I write as both an historian and a lawyer. Both professions claim to be devoted to the search for truth. And because historians and lawyers commonly turn their attention to facts after they have occurred, one might suppose that history and law would correct the mistakes of journalists reporting in the heat of the moment.
Yet from the point of view of an historian, official narratives about what happened at Lucasville are disturbing in many ways. For example, an historian writing about these events would almost certainly begin by exploring the causes of the riot. But as I will explain more fully in Chapter 8, in the Lucasville capital cases the defense was forbidden to present such evidence while the prosecution was permitted to expand on this theme at length.
Indeed, my belief in the integrity of truth-seeking in the law has been shaken by the Lucasville judicial proceedings. I have come to feel that the idea that the adversary process promotes truth-seeking may be as misleading as the assumption that the free market competition of profit-maximizing corporations will produce adequate public health.
In what follows I present the facts of the Lucasville disturbance as best I can discern them. This is the untold story that the state doesn’t want you to hear.
A central thesis of this book is that the State of Ohio and its citizens need to face up to the state’s share of responsibility for what happened at Lucasville.
It might be argued that the authorities have already conceded their part in the sequence of cause and effect. After the rebellion, prisoners not involved in the disturbance sued state defendants for negligence in connection with the rebellion. The prisoners’ suit alleged in part:
17. In 1990, following an investigation at SOCF, a State Senate Select Committee determined that the security policy and procedures at the institution were “woefully inadequate,” and recommended various reforms . . .
18. Also in 1990, in order to rectify overcrowded conditions and to maintain proper security within SOCF, defendants . . . announced the implementation of “Operation Shakedown” pursuant to which the entire population of the prison was to be single-celled.
19. As of April 11, 1993, single celling had not yet been instituted at SOCF; one thousand eight hundred and twenty (1,820) inmates were still housed in the prison (a number far in excess of the institution’s design capacity). Rather than defend against these and other allegations, the authorities settled with the prisoners for 4.1 million dollars.7
The correctional officers taken hostage, together with the widow and son of Officer Vallandingham, likewise sued the authorities “for numerous torts before and during the siege.” The state once again settled, for more than $2 million.8
In addition to the state’s role in causing the riot, there were several ways in which its negotiators heightened the peril for the correctional officers held hostage in L block.
Sergeant Howard Hudson, who was present throughout the negotiations, conceded that state negotiators deliberately stalled;
On April 12, apparently in response to communication between prisoners and the media, Warden Tate cut off water and electricity in L block. This action unnecessarily created a new issue between the occupiers and the authorities, failure to resolve which was the occasion for Officer Vallandingham’s murder.
On the morning of April 14, a state spokesperson named Tessa Unwin denigrated the prisoners’ demands and said that the prisoners’ threat to kill a guard was “just part of the language of negotiation.” Officer Vallandingham was killed the next day while an anguished George Skatzes, negotiating over the telephone, pleaded with the authorities to restore water and electricity.
None of this impressed the Supreme Court of Ohio. In affirming one of the death sentences, the Court stated:
Nor was DRC’s alleged refusal to “negotiate in good faith” relevant in the guilt phase. Let us be clear: The authorities in lawful charge of a prison have no duty to “negotiate in good faith” with inmates who have seized the prison and taken hostages, and the “failure” of those authorities to negotiate is not an available defense to inmates charged with the murder of a hostage.9
I believe these words to be profoundly misguided. To be sure, the authorities negotiated under duress. Moreover, if Sergeant Hudson and Ms. Unwin helped to cause the death of Officer Vallandingham, this of course does not mean that the leaders of the uprising were necessarily free of guilt.
What I nonetheless find unacceptable in the decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court is the attitude that prisoners in rebellion are “enemy combatants” toward whom the authorities have no obligations at all. For example, one Court of Appeals held that under the plain language of the law existing in 1993 the state had illegally eavesdropped on the conversations of prisoners in L block, and that this crucial evidence should therefore have been excluded at trial. On further appeal, the Ohio Supreme Court held that enforcement of the statute for the benefit of rioting prisoners would be “absurd.”
Such a holding, and the attitude prompting it, oversimplify a tangled sequence of cause and effect. Perhaps the law itself is prone to such rigidity. Perhaps legal practitioners are driven to view the world superficially by the desire to win. History, with its constipated academicism, has serious problems of its own. But history at least stands for the proposition that an event can have more than one cause, and that sometimes what happens in life is not a melodrama, but a tragedy in which we all have played a part. Is it too much to ask that before sending five more men to their deaths, we pause and seek to determine what really happened?
Finally, there is the misconduct of the state after the prisoners surrendered on April 21. At that point in time, the agency charged with investigating what had occurred — the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) — and the special prosecutorial team appointed to try the Lucasville cases were free to act calmly and with circumspection.
However, as I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, in the absence of physical evidence the state through its various agencies targeted those whom it believed to have led the uprising and built cases against them by cutting deals with prisoners willing to become informants. The government threatened prisoners with death if they declined to “cooperate.” I believe I can show that the prosecution put witnesses on the stand to offer testimony that the state knew to be false. Like Emile Zola in his celebrated exposé of the Dreyfus case, I conclude that the State of Ohio deliberately framed innocent men.
I shall argue that Ohio should be guided by the experience of the State of New York after the rebellion at New York’s Attica prison in 1971. In New York during the years 1975-1976 it came to light that prisoners had been induced to present perjured testimony, and that prosecutors were intentionally suppressing evidence of misconduct by state personnel during the assault on the prison. In the end, New York Governor Carey declared an amnesty for all persons involved in the Attica tragedy — both prisoners and persons involved in the state’s assault on the recreation yard — and extended clemency to prisoners who had already been convicted, or who had previously entered into plea bargains.
I believe that Ohio should do likewise. I believe there is a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct that should cause Ohio’s governor to pardon all Lucasville defendants found guilty of rebellion-related crimes.
Prosecutors have called it “the longest prison riot in United States history.”1 More accurately, the Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) refers to “the longest prison siege in U.S. history where lives were lost.” A 1987 rebellion at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta seems to have lasted a few hours longer.2
The uprising took place in April 1993 in Lucasville, Ohio, a small community just north of the Ohio River. Two populations, approximately equal in number, confronted one another there. On the one hand were the maximum security prisoners at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF), mostly black, mostly from cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland. On the other hand was the all-white population of the town. Almost everyone in Lucasville worked at the facility or knew someone who did.3
In the course of the eleven-day occupation, one correctional officer and nine prisoners were murdered by prisoners.
My wife Alice Lynd and I were living in northern Ohio at the time. Those eleven days in April 1993 coincided with the much-publicized siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. We were barely aware of the Lucasville disturbance.
In 1996, my wife and I learned that a supermaximum security (or “supermax”) prison was being built in Youngstown. Alice organized a community forum at a church near the site to explore the question, What is a supermax prison? Jackie Bowers from Marion, Ohio testified about the experience of 23-hour-a-day isolation. She is the sister of George Skatzes, one of the five men condemned to death after the Lucasville events.
Alice and I became acquainted with “Big George,” whom at this writing we have visited monthly for seven years. We became increasingly convinced of his innocence and volunteered to assist his post-conviction counsel. As retired attorneys, we had more time than busy practicing lawyers to read 5,000 or 6,000 page transcripts. Little by little we came to be researchers for several of the Lucasville Five defense teams.
Two things caught my attention from the outset.
First, there has been an extraordinary degree of solidarity among the five men condemned to death. They have shared legal materials to a greater extent than have their attorneys. They have expressed concern about one another’s health problems. Together they have engaged in a series of hunger strikes protesting their burdensome conditions of confinement. Yet two of the five were at the time of the uprising members of the Aryan Brotherhood, an organization thought to endorse white supremacy, and the other three are African Americans. I sensed a dynamic quite different from the unchanging — even unchangable — racism that many historians have recently ascribed to white workers in the United States.
Second, emotions in southern Ohio have run so strongly about the Lucasville events that truth has gotten lost in the shuffle. The Columbia Journalism Review published an article about the irresponsible speculations of the media during the eleven days. According to the Review:
Glaring mistakes were reported as fact, and were never corrected. Reporters . . . vied for atrocity stories. They ran scary tales — totally false, it was later found — that spread panic and paranoia throughout the region.4
Among the examples recounted of bad reporting about the Lucasville uprising were these:
Six days into the riot a front-page story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, citing anonymous sources, reported that along with seven inmate deaths 19 other people in the prison had been killed, including “some pretty barbarous mutilations of the dead.”
A reporter for Channel 4 told viewers that as many as 172 bodies were piled up in the prison. This body count turned out to be a head count of inmates in one of the blocks not involved in the riot.
The Akron Beacon Journal reported about the murder of Officer Robert Vallandingham “that his eyes had been gouged out, that his back, arms and legs had been broken, and that his tongue had been cut out.” Not one of these details was accurate.5
Even on the 10th anniversary of the uprising, in April 2003, media coverage in Ohio dealt almost exclusively with persons outside prison. The highest award given to Ohio correctional officers for bravery was renamed for Officer Vallandingham; his widow Peggy Vallandingham accepted the Vallandingham Gold Star Award for Valor in his name; and flags at Ohio prisons flew at half mast. News stories conveyed next to nothing about the men on Death Row.
This was not wholly the fault of the media. Applying what appears to be a permanent policy, in mid-February 2003 ODRC Director Reginald Wilkinson informed a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch that “no inmates convicted of riot crimes will be permitted to speak to” reporters.6
I write as both an historian and a lawyer. Both professions claim to be devoted to the search for truth. And because historians and lawyers commonly turn their attention to facts after they have occurred, one might suppose that history and law would correct the mistakes of journalists reporting in the heat of the moment.
Yet from the point of view of an historian, official narratives about what happened at Lucasville are disturbing in many ways. For example, an historian writing about these events would almost certainly begin by exploring the causes of the riot. But as I will explain more fully in Chapter 8, in the Lucasville capital cases the defense was forbidden to present such evidence while the prosecution was permitted to expand on this theme at length.
Indeed, my belief in the integrity of truth-seeking in the law has been shaken by the Lucasville judicial proceedings. I have come to feel that the idea that the adversary process promotes truth-seeking may be as misleading as the assumption that the free market competition of profit-maximizing corporations will produce adequate public health.
In what follows I present the facts of the Lucasville disturbance as best I can discern them. This is the untold story that the state doesn’t want you to hear.
A central thesis of this book is that the State of Ohio and its citizens need to face up to the state’s share of responsibility for what happened at Lucasville.
It might be argued that the authorities have already conceded their part in the sequence of cause and effect. After the rebellion, prisoners not involved in the disturbance sued state defendants for negligence in connection with the rebellion. The prisoners’ suit alleged in part:
17. In 1990, following an investigation at SOCF, a State Senate Select Committee determined that the security policy and procedures at the institution were “woefully inadequate,” and recommended various reforms . . .
18. Also in 1990, in order to rectify overcrowded conditions and to maintain proper security within SOCF, defendants . . . announced the implementation of “Operation Shakedown” pursuant to which the entire population of the prison was to be single-celled.
19. As of April 11, 1993, single celling had not yet been instituted at SOCF; one thousand eight hundred and twenty (1,820) inmates were still housed in the prison (a number far in excess of the institution’s design capacity). Rather than defend against these and other allegations, the authorities settled with the prisoners for 4.1 million dollars.7
The correctional officers taken hostage, together with the widow and son of Officer Vallandingham, likewise sued the authorities “for numerous torts before and during the siege.” The state once again settled, for more than $2 million.8
In addition to the state’s role in causing the riot, there were several ways in which its negotiators heightened the peril for the correctional officers held hostage in L block.
Sergeant Howard Hudson, who was present throughout the negotiations, conceded that state negotiators deliberately stalled;
On April 12, apparently in response to communication between prisoners and the media, Warden Tate cut off water and electricity in L block. This action unnecessarily created a new issue between the occupiers and the authorities, failure to resolve which was the occasion for Officer Vallandingham’s murder.
On the morning of April 14, a state spokesperson named Tessa Unwin denigrated the prisoners’ demands and said that the prisoners’ threat to kill a guard was “just part of the language of negotiation.” Officer Vallandingham was killed the next day while an anguished George Skatzes, negotiating over the telephone, pleaded with the authorities to restore water and electricity.
None of this impressed the Supreme Court of Ohio. In affirming one of the death sentences, the Court stated:
Nor was DRC’s alleged refusal to “negotiate in good faith” relevant in the guilt phase. Let us be clear: The authorities in lawful charge of a prison have no duty to “negotiate in good faith” with inmates who have seized the prison and taken hostages, and the “failure” of those authorities to negotiate is not an available defense to inmates charged with the murder of a hostage.9
I believe these words to be profoundly misguided. To be sure, the authorities negotiated under duress. Moreover, if Sergeant Hudson and Ms. Unwin helped to cause the death of Officer Vallandingham, this of course does not mean that the leaders of the uprising were necessarily free of guilt.
What I nonetheless find unacceptable in the decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court is the attitude that prisoners in rebellion are “enemy combatants” toward whom the authorities have no obligations at all. For example, one Court of Appeals held that under the plain language of the law existing in 1993 the state had illegally eavesdropped on the conversations of prisoners in L block, and that this crucial evidence should therefore have been excluded at trial. On further appeal, the Ohio Supreme Court held that enforcement of the statute for the benefit of rioting prisoners would be “absurd.”
Such a holding, and the attitude prompting it, oversimplify a tangled sequence of cause and effect. Perhaps the law itself is prone to such rigidity. Perhaps legal practitioners are driven to view the world superficially by the desire to win. History, with its constipated academicism, has serious problems of its own. But history at least stands for the proposition that an event can have more than one cause, and that sometimes what happens in life is not a melodrama, but a tragedy in which we all have played a part. Is it too much to ask that before sending five more men to their deaths, we pause and seek to determine what really happened?
Finally, there is the misconduct of the state after the prisoners surrendered on April 21. At that point in time, the agency charged with investigating what had occurred — the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) — and the special prosecutorial team appointed to try the Lucasville cases were free to act calmly and with circumspection.
However, as I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, in the absence of physical evidence the state through its various agencies targeted those whom it believed to have led the uprising and built cases against them by cutting deals with prisoners willing to become informants. The government threatened prisoners with death if they declined to “cooperate.” I believe I can show that the prosecution put witnesses on the stand to offer testimony that the state knew to be false. Like Emile Zola in his celebrated exposé of the Dreyfus case, I conclude that the State of Ohio deliberately framed innocent men.
I shall argue that Ohio should be guided by the experience of the State of New York after the rebellion at New York’s Attica prison in 1971. In New York during the years 1975-1976 it came to light that prisoners had been induced to present perjured testimony, and that prosecutors were intentionally suppressing evidence of misconduct by state personnel during the assault on the prison. In the end, New York Governor Carey declared an amnesty for all persons involved in the Attica tragedy — both prisoners and persons involved in the state’s assault on the recreation yard — and extended clemency to prisoners who had already been convicted, or who had previously entered into plea bargains.
I believe that Ohio should do likewise. I believe there is a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct that should cause Ohio’s governor to pardon all Lucasville defendants found guilty of rebellion-related crimes.