Vol. 77/No. 41 November 18, 2013
The meeting, attended by some 40 people, featured talks by Dayann Molina McDonough, god-sister of Kyam Livingston, who died as a result of willful negligence in police custody, and Ralph Poynter, representing the campaign to free Lynne Stewart, a criminal defense lawyer framed-up in 2006 and imprisoned by the U.S. government for the last four years.
“How can I not fight?” said McDonough. “When I learned that Kyam was dead, she said, “I offered my experiences from marching in Harlem against the shooting of Rodney King, to organizing protests when Amadou Diallo was shot, and linking up with the fight for justice for Sean Bell.”
Kyam Livingston died in the Brooklyn Central Booking jail July 21, where she had been detained since the previous night for allegedly violating a protection order.
While in the cell, Livingston became gravely ill and pleaded for medical attention. Other prisoners tried to comfort her and demanded action from the guards, who were indifferent to her suffering. “Let it play out,” one guard said when Livingston started going into convulsions.
“They let her lie there and after seven hours she died,” McDonough said. “I consider this torture. They decided her life wasn’t worth anything. But she had rights.”
The Justice for Kyam Livingston committee organizes protests on the 21st every month.
Nelson spoke about the fight against efforts by prison authorities to censor the Militant. “We won a victory in early October when the Florida Department of Corrections reversed a decision to impound an issue of the paper because it reported on the recent hunger strike by inmates in California. They backed down in face of publicity and growing support from other publications and organizations in the fight.”
“Kyam Livingston didn’t ‘die,’ she was killed by the cops who denied her medical attention,” Nelson said. “Such callousness and contempt toward working people is all too common. But when we decide to fight, it gets a resonance among other workers who confront not only the frame-ups and brutality of capitalist justice, but whose living standards and rights are under assault today.”
Nelson pointed to the cold-blooded killing of Miriam Carey by Capitol Police outside the White House Oct. 3, and how her executioners got a standing ovation from Democratic and Republican legislators in Congress as another example of the increasing brutality and coarseness meted out to working people today.
“Political prisoners have always had a special place in the struggles and movements of the oppressed and exploited,” Nelson said. “And prison authorities’ efforts to break our fighters like Lynne Stewart, like the Cuban Five, and like many others tend to fail.”
Fight to free Lynne Stewart
Ralph Poynter, of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee, was the final speaker. Stewart, 74, was given a 10-year sentence for supposedly violating Special Administrative Measures the U.S. government imposed on her client Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a Muslim cleric convicted in 1995 of “seditious conspiracy.”Stewart has been diagnosed with cancer and her doctor estimates she has 16 months left to live. Her request for compassionate release was rejected June 24 by the Federal Prison Bureau and again on Aug. 9 by federal Judge John Koeltl, the same judge who sentenced her.
“They have basically decided that she’s going to die in prison, it’s a death sentence,” Poynter said. “All legal avenues are exhausted, what is left for us is the fight for compassionate release.”
The defense committee has designed a postcard it wants supporters to send to Stewart and has a petition to sign on its website lynnestewart.org. Most recently supporters of Stewart organized a rally on Oct. 28, her birthday.
Poynter described how Stewart has won tremendous respect among fellow inmates for speaking out against prison brutalities and helping inmates with legal questions and a range of other matters, despite the fact that such acts of solidarity run counter to prison regulations.
“She has changed the culture in that prison by just being Lynne,” Poynter said. “At times they’ve sanctioned her, taken away her commissary, denied her phone calls and visits. But she has kept going. She is unbroken.”
Related articles:
‘Militant’ wins new round against censorship in Florida state prisons
Join the fight
Guantánamo hunger strikers demand end to force-feeding
Write to Lynne Stewart
London rally against deaths in cop custody: ‘Charge killers!
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home