May 15, 2002
Attica redux
By Bruce Jackson
Attica redux
By Bruce Jackson
Victims finding voiceIt has been more than 30 years since the slaughter in Attica Correctional Facility of 10 hostages and 29 convicts by New York State police and correctional officers, 28 months since the convicts' civil rights suit against the State of New York was resolved, and 31 months since U.S. District Court Judge Michael Telesca in Rochester decided that 502 inmates would share $8 million in money damages and their lawyers would share $4 million in fees.
In two days of public hearings at Rochester Institute of Technology last Thursday and Friday, two dozen of the surviving non-convict hostages in the 1971 takeover of Attica prison and their relatives for the first time were provided a public forum to tell the State how they were harmed , how they feel about it and what they want now.
The physical part of how they were harmed is a matter of public record: one guard was killed by convicts in the first two minutes of the takeover, 38 guards and civilian employees were held hostage under harsh conditions for four days, and ten were shot to death and several wounded by New York State police and correctional officers during the retaking on September 13, 1971.
How they feel is finally unspeakable, though a lot of words were uttered during the hearings at RIT. Witnesses told the three-person task force appointed by Governor George Pataki about the terrible things that happened to them in D yard in 1971 and how their lives have been influenced by those four days ever since. They told how they were tricked by the State out of eligibility for wrongful death damages. The told how the parsimonious New York State bookkeepers docked the hostages eight hours of pay for each of the four days they were tied up and blindfolded because they were, presumably, sleeping and not working at being hostages during those presumed eight hours of sleep. They talked about the pain of growing up without a husband or father, or living with memories too awful to discuss, too vivid to escape.
Many of them are angry that some of the convicts, who were serving time for felonies, got money, but they, who were just doing their jobs or are the relatives of people who were just doing their jobs, got nothing or very little.
They want $30 to $50 million in financial reparations, an annual memorial ceremony in Attica, access to state records that have thus far been kept closed, counseling, and an apology from the State.
What they'll get, what Pataki wants
They'll probably get everything except the $40 to $50 million. That would be many times what the convict survivors got, and it would be hard to justify right after the Pataki announced that he just realized the state has far less money in the till than he'd been telling everybody it had. But maybe he'll find a few coins for the Attica folks at the bottom of the cash drawer. This is an election year and George Pataki is running very hard. Prisons are New York State's largest public growth industry. A lot of prison guards and their families vote.
"Governor Pataki intends that you be forgotten no longer," Corrections Commissioner Goord told the witnesses at the Rochester hearing. Pataki knows what a boost he, Giuliani and Bush got in the wake of 9-11 and how much damage Andrew Cuomo did himself by questioning Pataki's commitment to helping innocent victims of bad people. Apologizing for another governor's blunder and saying, "Sure, have a memorial service if you want one," will cost him nothing and get him votes.
Pataki has been benefacting like a medieval pope and he is stroking just about everyone and everything in sight. His staff fights like dogs over bones to get him public credit (with photo ops) for things, whether or not he had anything to do with them. He's taken credit for federal funds negotiated by federal officials, demanded secrecy on announcing the appointment of Jeffrey Skolnik to head Buffalo's Center of Excellence for Bioinformatics until he could be in town for the pictures, taken center stage at the Children's Hospital settlement press conference even though, so far as I've been able to tell, he and his staff had nothing to do with it. He's produced and gotten aired a very expensive series of television spots about New York State's children's health insurance. The only difference between those tv spots and regular campaign tv spots is they don't carry the message "Paid for by the committee to re-elect George Pataki." The reason they don't carry that message is Pataki used public dollars to pay for them because they were "informational" rather than "political." Ho ho ho.
Why only now?
The prisoners' civil rights lawsuit was for unnecessary brutality during and after the retaking of the prison on September 13. During the early phases of their trial, I wondered why the hostages and their families weren't part of that suit, since it would have been much more difficult for the State to treat with contempt a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs were not only former Attica prisoners Herbert X. Blyden and Akil al-Jundi and Frank Smith, but also the families of the hostages who were shot to death and survivors like prison guard Mike Smith, who lived after a State trooper put five bullets in his abdomen.
The prisoners had the benefit of civil rights lawyers who, almost from the beginning, viewed what happened at Attica as a major abuse of power by the state, particularly Elizabeth Fink, who became convinced early on that they would prevail if they just kept at it long enough. The other victims of Attica never sought or found that kind of dedicated legal aid.
So far as I could find out, Fink never tried to include the non-convict victims in her own legal maneuvers. Maybe it was because she was brought in late (the day the statute of limitations for filing the class-action lawsuit would have expired). Maybe it was too close in time to the violence to form a coalition with the non-convict victims. But in later years, when legal action for the non-convict victims was foreclosed by the State's trickery, they could have made political common cause. Even if they couldn't join in court, they could have joined outside of it. Surely the convicts' public relations situation would have been enhanced if they could have made common cause with the others who had been irreparably harmed that brutal day. I asked Fink about that. "No way," she said. "Those people won't talk to us." I asked if there had been any attempts at conversation with them. "What's the point?" Fink said.
The non-convict victims had no attorneys able to rally them to a single cause; they weren't attractive to or interested in the kinds of civil rights lawyers who would spend years working on a case against the State without the certainty of a fat fee at the end. Many of them were terribly conflicted anyway: they were good people, law-abiding citizens, so how could the State of New York be their enemy? It was only when the prisoners got their financial settlement two years ago that the absurdity of their own passivity became intolerable.
There's another reason, I now realize, for their years of isolation. As long as the convicts' civil rights trial in Federal court was still going on, nobody in Albany was going to say anything about guilt or responsibility to former hostages and their families anyway. If the State said to an Attica widow, "We're sorry for killing your husband in an indiscriminate barrage of gunfire by State troopers who'd been told to do it and correctional officers who weren't even supposed to be there," how could a jury or judge hearing a dead prisoner's widow or child say, "There was nothing improper in the way your husband or father was shot to death?"
The beat goes on
The payments to former Attica prisoners and their families that Judge Michael Telesca authorized in August 2000 ended what had become the longest civil rights trial in U.S. history. But it was not the end of Attica. In the next few months, George Pataki will probably offer some kind of vague apology, he'll perhaps open some heretofore closed state records, he come out in favor of one more memorial service for the public calendar, he'll tell a state social agency to set up a counseling program for the survivors who want it, and, if can find them, he'll spread a few bucks around Wyoming County.
But that won't be the end of Attica either. The pain and suffering occasioned by the four-day prison takeover and Nelson Rockefeller's decision to send the State Police in shooting and the private decisions of some prison guards to do some illegal shooting and later some spectacular torturing still goes on, and shall continue to go on until the last convict and hostage who was in D-yard dies and the last child of those convicts and hostages dies.
Some things can't be fixed by ceremonies and money. But that's no reason not to have the ceremony, not to get the money.
I've written about what happened at Attica that weekend in 1971and how over the next 30 years nearly everybody tried to make it go away: Attica: Anniversary of Death.Copyright ©2002 Buffalo Report, Inc.