Troy Davis' Last Words
Released By Georgia
Department Of Corrections
(AUDIO)
First Posted: 10/7/11 05:05 PM ET
The Georgia Department of Corrections this week released an audio recording of the last words of Troy Davis, executed on Sept. 21 for the murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah police officer shot to death in 1989. Davis steadfastly maintained his innocence until the end and blamed another man for the killing.
More than 1,000 people attended Davis' funeral on Oct. 1 in Savannah.
The almost minute-and-a-half recording was provided in response to an open records request from the Associated Press. In a calm, clear voice, Davis first addressed the brother and son of MacPhail -- the only family members of the murdered man attending the execution -- asking them to "look deeper into this case, so that you really will finally see the truth."
Davis then asked his friends and family to "continue to fight this fight."
The recording ends with Davis addressing the prison employees carrying out the execution.
"For those about to take my life, my God have mercy on all of your souls. God bless you all," he said.
Complete transcript of the recording:
Well, first of all I'd like to address the MacPhail family. I'd like to let you all know that despite the situation -- I know all of you still are convinced that I'm the person that killed your father, your son and your brother, but I am innocent. The incidents that happened that night was not my fault. I did not have a gun that night. I did not shoot your family member.But I am so sorry for your loss. I really am -- sincerely.
All that I can ask is that each of you look deeper into this case, so that you really will finally see the truth.
I ask to my family and friends that you all continue to pray, that you all continue to forgive. Continue to fight this fight.
For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on all of your souls. God bless you all.
__________________________
California Prison Hunger Strike
Resumes as Sides Dig In
By IAN LOVETT
Published: October 7, 2011
But since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.LOS ANGELES — When inmates across California’s state prisons went on a hunger strike in July, prison officials negotiated with them, ultimately reaching an agreement to bring the strike to an end after three weeks.
“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”
This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.
An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes.
The new protocols seek to isolate inmates participating in the strike from those in the general population and potentially subject them to disciplinary measures, while prisoners identified as strike leaders could potentially be denied contact with visitors and even lawyers.
In addition, two lawyers who had helped mediate talks were temporarily barred from state prisons last week because “their presence in the institution/facility presents a security threat.”
The animosity goes both ways, suggesting no easy resolution to a situation in which inmates are protesting being kept in isolation in excess of 22 hours a day, part of an attempt to hamper gangs.
In late July, inmates ended their initial strike after officials agreed to concessions for prisoners in security housing units, including allowing them wall calendars, hobby items like drawing paper and a comprehensive review of how inmates are placed in these isolation units.
The new hunger strike drew 4,000 people last week across the state. But that number had drifted to fewer than 800 by Friday, according to corrections officials, as the department has moved to isolate participants from the general prison population.
Terry Thornton, a department spokeswoman, said that the promised reforms were continuing as promised, and officials remained willing to negotiate, but that leaders had not approached them with a new list of demands.
“Everything we said we were going to do, we did,” Ms. Thornton said. “We are kind of puzzled about why this action was taken again. The review takes time, but we are on track.”
Mistrust of the department is fervent among strike leaders, according to Anne Weills, a lawyer who met with four of them at Pelican Bay. Prisoner rights advocates have also accused the department of low-balling the number of prisoners involved in the strike, arguing that as many as 12,000 inmates had participated.
Ms. Thornton confirmed that 15 inmates at Pelican Bay had been moved to an administrative housing unit because they were identified as coercing other inmates into participation. She also said that all the strike leaders at Pelican Bay were confirmed gang members, and that four of the 11 leaders had ended their strikes.
But Ms. Weills said other prisoners told her that those four did so because they could no longer endure conditions at the administrative housing unit where they had been moved.
“We’re freezing,” Ronald Yandell, one of the strike leaders, said to Ms. Weills this week. “The air-conditioner is blowing. It’s like arctic air coming through, blowing at top speed. It’s torture. They’re trying to break us.”
Oscar Hidalgo, a spokesman for the corrections department, said he did not know why the four leaders had ended their strike.
Sharon Dolovich, a professor of prison law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the department’s response to the second strike reflected court cases in the last 25 years that had given officials more discretion to clamp down on inmate rights.
“Before, they didn’t want to seem inhumane, and now they’re in damage control mode,” she said. “They’re demonstrating that they’re willing to use the full scope of legal discretion to shut it down.”
>via: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/us/hunger-strike-resumes-in-california-pris...
__________________________
Prisoners being frozen
to break hunger strike;
some quit, some willing to die
for their rights
October 8, 2011
by Deborah Dupre, Human Rights Examiner
“We are hoping that this widespread participation will push (prison officials) to negotiate and honor the basic demands of the people locked behind those walls,” said Isaac Ontiveros, a spokesman for Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity told CNN Tuesday afternoon.
“You have people in there that have been in solitary confinement for 20 years. They just want to change their conditions.”
Lawyers finally able to have one visit last week, after some lawyers of the prisoners’ mediation team have been banned, report that California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has the air conditioning on high in 50 degree weather.
Advocates have significant concerns about some of the measures that the CDCR is implementing in response to the strike. “Prisoners are being denied both family and legal visits, they are receiving serious rules violations and their mail is being stopped,” says Carol Strickman, a legal representative of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.
“CDCR is clearly trying to further isolate the hunger strikers in the hopes of breaking the strike,” she said.
“The CDCR’s numbers appear to be low due to guards falsifying records of hunger strikers,” according toPrisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. “At Calipatria, for instance, hunger strikers report they were finally given their liquids after filing medical requests – even though they were still denied liquids for the first several days of the strike. Now, however, guards have been delivering liquids on the prisoners’ food trays. Once strikers take the liquids off of the trays, the guards record they are not striking. CDCR counts strikers based on who touches the state-issued food trays and who doesn’t.”
According to advocates for the prisoners, the hunger strike representatives continue to be willing to risk their lives to win their five core demands, each of which reflects a basic human right.
“CDCR is clearly trying to further isolate the hunger strikers in the hopes of breaking the strike,” said attorney Carol Strickman.
Medical conditions are worsening for strikers throughout the state.
“We’ve received reports that after 12 days of no food, prisoners are once again losing severe weight and fainting. One hunger striker at Pelican Bay was denied his medication and consequently suffered a heart attack and is now is an outside hospital in Oregon,” stated an advocate, refraining from identification on the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website.
Other reports indicate that striking prisoners are being moved.
“We don’t know if they are being removed from their cells to some other location or transferred. It’s really terrifying that your loved one could be taken away like that for participating in a peaceful protest,” said Irma Hedlin, who has family members in the Pelican Bay SHU.
Approximately 12,000 prisoners across California last week resumed the hunger strike they had started in July when 7,000 prisoners refused food, some for over a month, in America’s largest peaceful prisoner protest in history. The prisoners were protesting SHU (Security Housing Unit) solitary confinement conditions at Pelican Bay and other prisons, where several thousand prisoners are held in isolation, confined to windowless cells over 22 hours a day, with minimal human contact and no work, recreational or educational programs or rehabilitation.
These conditions cause mental illness, according to research.
Amnesty International is calling for swift implementation of reforms to California Security Housing Units as the Pelican Bay hunger strike continues:
“Amnesty International is concerned by reports that the California Corrections Department is treating the current hunger strike as an ‘organized disturbance’ and disciplining those who participate. Such disciplinary action reportedly includes removing prisoners in the general population who support the strike to solitary confinement in Administrative Segregation units. The organization has written to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to urge that prisoners seeking humane conditions are not subjected to punitive measures.”
As previously reported, a federal court ordered California to move over 33,000 inmates out of its inhumane prisons that experts say are racist, with solitary confinement Security Housing Units (SHUs) typical of supermax prisons throughout the United States, the nation with the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, where torture is inflicted daily, often until death.
While mainstream media continues an almost complete blackout about the historic event of thousands of America’s so-called “worst of the worst” peacefully protesting against inhumane conditions, family and community members continue supporting the hunger strikers with rallies, community events, neighborhood candlelight vigils, publicizing the courageous action inside prison and building pressure on representatives to intervene in the CDCR’s handling of the strike.
A petition to the White House begins, “The United States is the only country that uses solitary confinement in prisons in the manner that it does.”
According to an email I received on Wednesday, California prisoners particularly appreciate JR, one of the few reporters respecting them and their plight as newsworthy.
“You know that if the media don’t mention you and your issues, you’re nobody in the world today,” he wrote.
“You might as well be Dred Scott, who, when he sued for his freedom after his ‘owner’ wouldn’t let him buy himself, was told by the U.S. Supreme Court that he and all Black people are ‘so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ In California prisons – and much of the rest of the world – that’s still the rule.”
When JR started writing for the Bay View 10 years ago in 2001, he was already volunteering at KPFA, the nation’s first listener-supported radio station and founder of the Pacifica Radio Network. As controversial as JR is, due to his insistence that “what is important to Black people should be important enough to everybody to be reported as news,” it took what he called “all these years of pushing and prodding” KPFA for him to finally getregularly on the air just in the past couple of months.
Without media coverage, “You might as well be Dred Scott, who, when he sued for his freedom after his ‘owner’ wouldn’t let him buy himself, was told by the U.S. Supreme Court that he and all Black people are ‘so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ In California prisons – and much of the rest of the world – that’s still the rule.”
On the other hand, Los Angeles’ popular 102.7 KIIS FM is losing listener supporters over their management of the prison torture issue. On its 8:00 a.m. program Thursday morning according to some listeners, the two talk show hosts spoke about the California prisoner hunger strikers.
One commenter in the Pelican Bay-California Hunger Strike Solidarity group on Facebook called the show hosts’ commentary “awful and harsh” and “making fun of the inmates.”
“The hosts asked why the prisoners complain about their food,” saying they get three state meals “and gosh, homeless people get nothing so why are they complaining?”
“The hosts were also laughing and joking around about how they don’t support inhumane treatment but they say ‘those men must have done some pretty awful things to have gotten into solitary confinement.’”
“So to everyone who were fans of 102.7 KIIS FM, this is what they were saying this morning without even asking any other opinions or looking into why they are in there. Ignorance … pure ignorance.”
“If anyone knew why these men are put into solitary confinement [it’s] not based on a crime but based on some other person dropping their name or art work or a tattoo by a correctional officer saying this is true and not based on their original conviction.”
One of America’s most pressing and well-hidden human rights abuses is the fact that over 100,000 people in the United States are held in small solitary confinement cells, some for life, a form of torture, while some experience even worse torture.
How we can help
Pressure Gov. Jerry Brown to tell CDCR to negotiate in good faith to meet the prisoners’ five core demands and cease all retaliation against the hunger strikers. Call (916) 445-2841, email him athttp://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php and write to him: Governor Jerry Brown, State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814. A sample script is posted here.
Attend or organize a Thursday-night vigil. Families of SHU prisoners are calling for supporters everywhere to hold mass vigils in support of the hunger strikers on Thursday nights. If you can organize a vigil in your community, email prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity@gmail.com. For a list of events, check out Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity’s events page here.
In the Bay Area, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition will hold a weekly support vigil throughout the hunger strike every Thursday evening 5-7 p.m. The Thursday night hunger strike support vigils will be at held at different locations in San Francisco and Oakland each week. The next two are
- Thursday, Oct. 13: 24th and Mission, San Francisco
- Thursday, Oct. 20: Fruitvale BART, Oakland
For more information on the weekly vigils, call Lisa Roellig at (415) 238-1801.
Sign the new petition to the White House on the White House website calling for an end to long-term solitary confinement.
Telephone KIIS Radio to lodge a complaint about their misguided disrespect for human rights of inmates by calling (818) 559-2252 or (818) 566-4814.
Human Rights Examiner Deborah Dupre holds American and Australian science and education graduate degrees and has 30 years experience in human rights, environmental and peace activism. Email her atGdeborahdupre@gmail.com and visit her website, www.DeborahDupre.com. Bay View staff contributed to this story, which first appeared at Examiner.com, mainly by incorporating excerpts from other posts by Deborah Dupre.
Family members and supporters of hunger strikers rally in front of CDCR
by Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity
Family members and supporters of prisoners on strike throughout California held a spirited demonstration outside California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) headquarters in Sacramento on Oct. 5 as the strike entered its 10th day.
Over 1,200 prisoners continue to refuse food in an effort to force the CDCR to address their five core demands, in particular those related to long term solitary confinement, gang validation, debriefing and group punishment. Over the course of the last week, nearly 12,000 prisoners participated in the strike from 13 California prisons, as well as California prisoners housed out of state in Mississippi, Arizona and Oklahoma, making it one of the largest prisoner hunger strikes in U.S. history
1. End administrative abuse and group punishment.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify gang status criteria.
3. End long-term solitary confinement.
4. Provide adequate and nutritious food.
5. Expand and provide constructive programming and privileges.
Speakers provided updates on recent hunger strike developments, as the CDCR increases its repressive tactics in an attempt to break the historic strike. Attorney Carol Strickman described the CDCR’s retaliation against hunger strikers, including denying attorney visits and barring the prisoner’s legal and mediation team. The CDCR has targeted Strickman and attorney Marilyn McMahon.
Both lawyers have been barred from meeting with prisoners pending “investigation” under the absurd claim that they are inciting a “mass disturbance.” Family members, too, spoke of being denied visits to their loved ones, as the CDCR, in an effort to further isolate the hunger strikers, has now barred all family visits.
In addition to condemning the injustices at Pelican Bay and other CDCR facilities, speakers repeatedly emphasized the courage of the hunger strikers and the inspiration they are providing for people in and outside of the walls. The day ended with a brief assembly to discuss next steps in what promises to be an intense and protracted struggle against inhumane incarceration in particular and state repression overall.
Despite the CDCR’s retaliation on hunger strikers and their families, prisoners, their families and community members continue to struggle to win the prisoners’ demands.
To learn more and read the latest updates, frequently visit Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity athttp://www.prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com, call (510) 444-0484 or emailprisonerhungerstrikesolidarity@gmail.com.
Read the transcript of this interview with Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. It was conducted by Scott Harris of Between the Lines, a nationally syndicated progressive news analysis radio show, for broadcast on Oct. 5.
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) staff, board and partners discusses their work to support prisoners on strike at Pelican Bay, as well as others in solitary confinement.
Describing torture of prisoners for mind and behavior control, prisoner advocate Kendra Castenada, who produced this video, asks where is the “rehabilitation” in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation? She points out that in Calipatria State Prison, near the Mexican border, CDCR refuses to use air conditioning despite the oppressive heat. In contast, at Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border, CDCR is freezing the prisoners on hunger strike by turning the air conditioning to 50 degrees.
Kendra Castaneda defends the rights of prisoners being tortured in California’s Calipatria Prison.
Amber from Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarit on Vimeo.
Amber, whose brother has been locked up in the Pelican Bay SHU for 10 years, describes the impact on her family at the legislative hearing in Sacramento on Aug. 23.
Updated: 10/7/11 05:40 PM ET