Jailhouse Lawyers. Mumia Abu-Jamal

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СКАЧАТЬ in the hole for years, Warren found that the only companions he could count on (other than his “old-head” Steve) were books. So, through force of will, he taught himself to read. And once those strange black scribbles on paper began to make sense to his brain, he broke the bank of learning and reading.

      He didn’t just love reading, he loved books, and scoundrel that he was, he became what Steve jokingly called a “biblio-kleptomaniac”—a notorious book thief. Any book that came into his hands would be quickly and thoroughly devoured—and then would mysteriously disappear!

      One day, returning from the yard, I glanced into his cell, only to find him sitting in the very center of the cell, with his feet tucked beneath him like a Zen monk. On the floor were four thick books, placed around him like cardinal points of a compass.

      Having never seen such a sight before, I asked him what was he doing.

      “I’m readin’, Mu,” he innocently answered, as if it were obvious to any slug with a brain.

      “Four books—at one time?”

      “Sure,” he replied, with his distinctive high-octave voice, as if it should’ve been obvious to a dim-witted child.

      “But, why . . . ?”

      “I gotta get ’em read before the guards come in and take ’em!”

      I recognized among the books one I sent him a few days before. It was Miguel Mármol, Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s remarkable biography of the Latin American revolutionary. I began questioning Warren about the early chapters and he answered each question promptly and correctly.

      He spoke about the other texts just as easily.

      “But, Warren—how do you read four books at the same time?”

      “I read one chapter from one book, then spin around to the next book, and then the next, until I finish them all.”

      “And you don’t get mixed up or confused by switching from one book to the next—one storyline to the next?”

      “Nope—it’s fun that way! You don’t do that?”

      “Don’t do that? I can’t do that, man! Stuff’ll get all jumbled up!”

      “C’mon, Mu—stop playin’, man.”

      Warren was serious. But I never saw the copy of Mármol again.

      Warren would ship hundreds of books home to his mother. When I asked him about it, he said, “When I get home, I’ma start a community library, so kids in the ’hood can grow up readin’ these books.”

      When Warren went home, however, he wouldn’t get the chance to build his dream. He got into a conflict with another young man in the informal drug industry and was convicted of slaying the man. He was sentenced to life in October 1991. While awaiting trial, he was also charged with stabbing a man to death at the since-closed (and later reopened) Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia.

      Warren, well schooled by Steve Evans, acted as his own attorney at the murder trial where there was no shortage of jailhouse snitches. The jury was out for six hours before they returned with their verdict.

      Not guilty.

      Even the trial judge had to admit, “You did a good job representing yourself.”

      Warren calmly responded to the verdict, “It took a long time to prove my innocence.”⁷

      He had no GED.⁸ He had no college degree. He had no law degree. But he had years of tutelage under Steve Evans, jailhouse lawyer. Evans’s instructions doubtless saved him from death row.

      Warren learned many things in the hundreds of books he swiped and read, among them a deep love of reading and a hunger for writing. He’s written and self-published several books on his rough-and-tumble upbringing in North Philadelphia. His first work, published in 2005, was City of Nightmares: BQ4775, a book as raw and as original as its author.

      Warren also read his share of law books. Through long years of reading, as well as enduring Steve’s late-night lectures, Warren Henderson learned the law.

      The Law of Jailhouse Lawyers

      In prison as elsewhere, as we have seen, law is what the judge says it is. What published opinions claim, in all their legal niceties, matters little.

      For jailhouse lawyers, one of the fundamental cases is Johnson v. Avery, a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected Tennessee’s punishments against a prisoner who assisted another prisoner with his legal work.⁹ Tennessee argued that the prisoner violated a prison regulation barring prisoners from functioning as jailhouse lawyers; he violated state law restricting the practice of law to those licensed to do so.

      The Supreme Court determined that the central question was the availability and quality of legal assistance provided by Tennessee to those prisoners who needed it. The state allowed prisoners minimal assistance, sometimes limited to allowing prisoners to place phone calls to public defenders, and the court, finding this wanting, held that absent more adequate assistance, it could not penalize a prisoner jailhouse lawyer for giving his. In essence, the Johnson v. Avery decision recognized not the right of jailhouse lawyers to practice, but the right of their clients to have meaningful access to the courts. Nevertheless, it has become a kind of charter for jailhouse lawyers ever since.

      Some states have attempted to institutionalize this practice by sending interested prisoners to paralegal courses and, when they graduate, hiring them as prison library assistants. This comes with quite a caveat, however, for some paralegals are strictly forbidden to assist prisoners in preparing or bringing a legal claim to court. They may provide case citations or copies of cases decided by a given court, but only if the borrower knows and cites the proper case numbers. Yet by restricting rather than expanding the right of the imprisoned to fight their case or to litigate a claim against the prison or the state, the state’s initial aim is reached, albeit by other means.

      Before Johnson v. Avery, jailhouse lawyers were routinely thrown into the hole for their writ-writing activities. In Johnson’s wake, however, states across the country lost a series of cases brought by jailhouse lawyers who, as a direct consequence of their violation of prison regulations, had lost good time, or a cut in one’s term, and other amenities. For example, in Ayers v. Ciccone, a federal court granted a writ of habeas corpus, ordered restoration of the petitioner’s good time, and issued a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the regulation without a “reasonable alternative” that offered legal help to prisoners of the Missouri Medical Center.¹⁰

      But a funny thing happened in the aftermath of Johnson v. Avery.

      Prison administrators began using other reasons and pretexts to punish prisoners who were active jailhouse lawyers—especially those who were engaged in civil actions against the prison administration.

      In 1991, a group of scholars, researchers, and activists headed by Mark S. Hamm conducted an extensive review of disciplinary actions occurring in prisons across the country. The study found that no segment of the modern American prison population—not Blacks nor gays nor AIDS patients nor gang members—outweighed jailhouse lawyers when it came to prisoners who were targeted by the prison administration СКАЧАТЬ