Forwarded message:
>Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 15:18:53 -0500 (CDT)
>From: MichaelP <papadop@peak.org>
>Subject: court upholds nine-year solitary confinement of Black Panther
>
>WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : The Brutal Society
>http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/penn-j03.shtml
>
>US court upholds nine-year solitary confinement of Philadelphia man
>
>By Tom Bishop
>3 June 2000
>
>A three-judge panel of the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia
>has unanimously ruled that Pennsylvania authorities may continue the
>nine-year solitary confinement of Russell Shoats, a former member of a
>militant black activists' organization.
>
>In the decision, Circuit Judge Richard L. Nygaard of Erie, said Shoats has
>been in the "hole" since June 1991 "because he is, in the considered
>judgment of all the prison professionals who have evaluated him, a current
>threat to ... security, and ... to the safety of other people." ( To read
>the court's decision go to:
>http://vls.law.vill.edu/locator/3d/May2000/993603.txt).
>
>Shoats is in "administrative custody" at the State Correctional
>Institution at Greene in Western Pennsylvania. He is kept in his cell 23
>hours a day, five days a week, and 24 hours a day for the other two days.
>He eats meals alone. He has been denied visits with family for eight
>years. He has no organized activities, no radio, no TV, no telephone calls
>"except emergency or legal calls," no books other than legal materials
>"and a personal religious volume." At the appeal hearing, prison officials
>acknowledged that they generally are concerned about the psychological
>damage to an inmate after 90 days of such confinement and would generally
>recommend transfer to the general population after 90 days as a
>consequence.
>
>Shoats was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly participating with
>five other activists in the August 29, 1970 shooting of Fairmount Park
>Police Sgt. Frank Von Colin in Philadelphia. Shoats was part of the Black
>Unity Movement, one of several paramilitary groups that formed during the
>period in response to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's initiating COINTELPRO
>in 1968, a program which included infiltration and disruption of the Black
>Panther Party. The program led to the murder of dozens of members of the
>Black Panther Party and the frame-ups of many more. In the decision to
>continue Shoats' solitary confinement, Judge Nygaard said, "Shoats
>participated in the attack as a member of a black revolutionary group that
>sought to eradicate all authority."
>
>Tensions were high in Philadelphia in the summer of 1970 because
>Philadelphia Police Chief Frank Rizzo had ordered a crackdown on militant
>groups in the run-up to the national convention of the Black Panther Party
>in Philadelphia on September 5, 1970. The shooting of Von Colin prompted a
>2 a.m. raid on the Black Panther headquarters in North Philadelphia. After
>the raid police officials allowed news photographers to take humiliating
>photos of the Black Panthers being strip searched on the street.
>
>Shoats escaped from Huntingdon State Prison for 27 days in 1977, and for 3
>days in 1980 from the Fairview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
>After the 1977 escape, he was kept in the "hole" from 1977 to 1982 except
>for the one year he spent at Fairview. Shoats had been sent to Fairview by
>the court after he was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic. He had
>previously attempted jail breaks in 1972 and 1976.
>
>In a 1982 interview with the radio station WQRO at the Huntingdon County
>Courthouse where Shoats was being retried for a kidnapping and robbery
>during his 1977 escape, Shoats said, "I don't feel as though I'm guilty
>for what I'm charged with.... Consequently, I've always got the hope that
>somewhere along the line I'll get out of prison."
>
>Five members of the Black Unity Movement were convicted of first-degree
>murder in Von Colin's death. The sixth, Richard Thomas, fled and was at
>large for 26 years. He was arrested in suburban Chicago in March 1996. The
>only incriminating evidence found in Thomas's apartment in 1970 was a
>telephone book with numerous names, including those of several
>codefendants in the case.
>
>Prosecutors tried to persuade two men convicted in the killing, Hugh
>Sinclair Williams and Alvin Joiner, to testify against Thomas in exchange
>for a recommendation by prosecutors that their life sentences would be
>commuted, but the defendants refused. Thomas, who did not testify,
>contended that he fled because he feared he would be railroaded - or shot
>- by police after he was identified as a suspect. Thomas was acquitted in
>a jury trial on November 3, 1999. Juror Bill Forman said, "Some black
>jurors remembered the times - 1970 - that it had been difficult being a
>black." The jury included six blacks and six whites.
>
>The use of solitary confinement has a long tradition in Pennsylvania. In
>1829, Eastern State Penitentiary opened in Philadelphia. It was the
>creation of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of
>Public Prisons, a group of "free thinkers" and Quakers. Instead of the
>previous methods of punishment by torture, dismemberment and death, they
>advocated solitary confinement where the prisoners could meditate on their
>sins and resolve to live a better life.
>
>Known as the "Pennsylvania System," it was considered progressive because
>it combined punishment and hoped for reform. All of the cell blocks
>radiated from a central rotunda that allowed maximum security and
>surveillance. Inmates were alone in individual cells that had a bed, a
>toilet, a worktable, a small exercise yard, a skylight and a Bible. Human
>contact was kept to the minimum possible. The penitentiary's radical
>design became the model for 300 similar prisons in Europe, Asia and South
>America. The practice of solitary confinement as a prison-wide policy was
>abandoned at the prison by the end of the nineteenth century because it
>was found to drive inmates insane. The prison closed in 1971 and is now a
>national historic landmark.
>
>After touring Eastern State in 1842, the British novelist Charles Dickens
>condemned solitary confinement, stating: "I hold this slow and daily
>tampering with the mysteries of the brain is immeasurably worse than any
>torture of the body." ( See "Philadelphia and its Solitary prison" from
>"American Notes" by Charles Dickens:
>http://www.bibliomania.com/Fiction/dickens/American/chap07.html)
>
>======================
>
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