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California's longest serving death row inmate to die
DAVID KRAVETS, Associated Press Writer
Monday, March 26, 2001
©2001 Associated Press

URL:

(03-26) 12:38 PST SAN QUENTIN, Calif. (AP) -- The ``Dean of
California's
Death Row'' spent what he hoped would be
his last day alive Monday as a small group of lawyers tried
against his
wishes to block his looming execution.

Robert Lee Massie, who killed in 1965 and 1978, has spent more
time on death
row than any other currently condemned
man in the state. He said he gave up 21 years of appeals to
protest the
snail's pace in which California's death penalty
system moves.

California is home to the nation's most clogged death row,
incarcerating
nearly 600 condemned prisoners. Massie is the
only inmate eligible to die -- the others are still challenging
their
sentences.

Massie's was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 12:01 a.m.
Tuesday
at San Quentin State Prison.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday declined to
revisit its
ruling that said a lower court was correct to
decide that Massie was competent to drop his appeals. The U.S.
Supreme Court
will be asked to review the appeals
court's latest decision.

Other pending litigation concerns just what witnesses to the
execution --
including media representatives -- are allowed to
see. The state wants to open the death chamber's curtain only
after Massie
has been strapped to a gurney and had the
needles inserted into his arms.

The state calls this a security measure, saying the executioners'
identity
must be protected. U.S. District Judge Vaughn
Walker ruled otherwise, saying the state must show the entire
process. A
state challenge to that ruling is before the
appeals court.

Massie is to become only the ninth inmate to be executed at San
Quentin
State Prison since California voters
overwhelmingly voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1978.

Hundreds of others still haven't been provided an attorney for
their
mandatory first appeal to the California Supreme
Court, the initial stop in a maze of state and federal appeals.

``I don't see any use in continuing this charade,'' Massie, 59,
said in a
recent interview.

But a pen-pal of Massie's has had other ideas.

Michael Kroll, a freelance journalist in Oakland who is opposed to
the death
penalty and who befriended Massie while
interviewing him, said he believes the killer isn't mentally fit
to give up
his appeals. Kroll hired the lawyers who pursuing
the last-ditch plea.

In California, local district attorneys choose whether to seek the
death
penalty or a life sentence in capital trials. San
Francisco's current D.A., Terence Hallinan, opposes capital
punishment and
sided with Kroll's petition.

Massie first murder was during a Los Angeles-area crime spree on
Jan. 7,
1965. He shot Mildred Weiss of San Gabriel
while robbing or assaulting a total of five people.

At one point, Massie came so close to execution he had ordered his
last
meal. But in 1972 -- the same year the U.S.
Supreme Court abolished the death penalty -- his sentence was
commuted to
life.

He was paroled in 1978, and on Jan. 3, 1979, Massie killed San
Francisco
liquor store owner Bob Naumoff during a
robbery.

Victims of his terror say it's now time for him to die. Once such
man is
Charles Harris, who survived a bullet from
Massie's gun, but saw his friend Naumoff die.

``I want an end of this and that's that,'' Harris said.

©2001 Associated Press

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New York Times National

The New York Times

April 15, 2001

Little Sympathy or Remedy for Inmates Who Are Raped

By TAMAR LEWIN

Did Dillard, a prisoner at Corcoran State Prison in California, knew what
was in store the instant he heard who his new cellmate was to be: Wayne
Robertson, a 230-pound sexual predator.

Two years earlier, the men had fought after Mr. Dillard rejected Mr.
Robertson's sexual advances. And Mr. Dillard, a 120-pound inmate serving
time for assault, had been worried enough about future encounters to put Mr.
Robertson's name on a list of known enemies with whom he should not share a
cell.

But on Friday, March 5, 1993, Mr. Dillard was moved into Mr. Robertson's
cell. On Saturday, Mr. Dillard was raped. Mr. Robertson, who is serving life
without parole for murder, testified that he sodomized Mr. Dillard "all
night long."

On Sunday, Mr. Robertson raped him again. On Monday, Mr. Robertson was taken
to a hearing, and when the cell door was opened for his return, Mr. Dillard
ran out and refused to re-enter the cell.

Inmate rape has such an established place in the mythology of prison that
references to confinement often call forth jokes about sexual assault.

But while rape is accepted as a fact of prison life, the subject has
received little serious attention and legal remedies are rare. Few prison
rapists are ever prosecuted, and most prisons provide little counseling or
medical attention for rape victims, or help in preventing such attacks.

The widespread social reluctance to address the issue is reinforced by many
legal constraints. A 1996 law barring the Federal Legal Services Corporation
from financing legal aid organizations that represent prisoners reduced the
number of lawyers available to litigate on behalf of inmates.

That same year, the Prison Litigation Reform Act made it far more difficult
for inmates to challenge the conditions of their confinement. In the few
incidents that do lead to legal claims, the victims, as convicted criminals,
do not garner much sympathy from politicians, prison officials or juries.

And the legal standards for prisons' liability create a perverse incentive
for guards to ignore the problem. Generally, prison officials can only be
held liable for an assault if they had actual knowledge of a substantial
risk to a prisoner and ignored it.

"Many inmates find that when they try to report a rape, the guards don't
want to hear it," said Joanne Mariner, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, who
recently completed a study of prison rape, to be released on Thursday. "They
tell them to act like a man, to deal with the problem themselves. There are
very few prisons that follow good procedures for counseling, or sending
inmates for a medical examination."

Because almost half the states do not collect statistics on prison rape —
and many inmates quickly learn that there is nothing to be gained in
reporting rape — there are no reliable national figures on its frequency.
And many prison systems play down the problem, suggesting that rape is so
rare that there is no need for data.

Prison officials say that much of the sexual activity in prison seems to be
consensual — or if it is not that it is impossible to detect coercion. But
lawyers who have spent substantial time investigating prison conditions say
guards are too quick to assume consent.

Donna Brorby, lead counsel for the prisoners in a decades-old lawsuit
challenging Texas prison conditions, explained it this way:

"In the Texas prison system, where I spent months interviewing prisoners,
the policy, of course not written, is to leave it up to each prisoner to
defend himself, and to consider people who don't fight off their attackers
to be consenting. But many people feel powerless to fight off predators.
Rape is the top of the pinnacle of a whole spectrum of violence and
victimization in prisons."

With two million Americans incarcerated nationwide, only Texas, Ohio,
Florida, Illinois and the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported more than 50
sexual assaults a year in response to a Human Rights Watch request for
information.

But one study of inmates in seven men's prisons in four states — published
in the December 2000 issue of The Prison Journal, an academic quarterly —
found that 21 percent of the prisoners reported at least one episode of
forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent
reported that they had been raped.

A 1996 survey of prisoners in Nebraska state prisons found that 22 percent
of the inmates said they had been forced to have sexual contact while
incarcerated, most of them having submitted to forced anal sex at least
once.

Still, the next year, when Human Rights Watch asked for information on
prison rape, Nebraska prison officials said such incidents were "minimal."
Other states, like New Mexico, said they had "no recorded incidents over the
past few years."

A survey in one Southern state, which provided information to Human Rights
Watch on the condition that it not be named, underscored the confusion.
While the survey found that prisoners estimated that one in three inmates
had been coerced into sex, prison guards said it was about one in five.
Prison officials in supervisory positions estimated about one in eight.

The Dillard case — first in criminal court and now in civil court — is one
of the few to come to public attention. Mr. Dillard's court papers charge
that prison guards set up the rape, transferring him into the cell of Mr.
Robertson, known as the Booty Bandit, to punish him for kicking another
guard.

Mr. Robertson backed Mr. Dillard's account. He told a state investigator in
1997 that he had asked Robert Decker, a guard, to place Mr. Dillard with
him, and that Mr. Decker agreed to the move so Mr. Robertson could show Mr.
Dillard "how to do his time."

Mr. Decker and three other guards at the prison were charged with aiding and
abetting sodomy. At the 1999 trial, they said they had not known that Mr.
Robertson, 36, would attack Mr. Dillard, 23. or that the two were enemies.
The guards said that Mr. Dillard had not complained about the cell transfer
and that it had been a mistake, not an act of retribution.

But Mr. Robertson and Roscoe Pondexter, a former prison guard who worked the
weekend of the rapes, testified that the guards had knowingly exposed Mr.
Dillard to sexual assault.

"They knew Dillard was my enemy, and they knew who I was," said Mr.
Robertson, whose records include more than a dozen complaints from inmates
of being raped, choked or attacked after they refused his advances. "They
put Dillard in for something to happen to him."

The four guards were acquitted in the criminal trial.

Mr. Dillard is now out of prison, living with his wife and two children in
California. His civil suit against the guards is scheduled for trial in in
January. If he wins, prisoners' rights advocates believe it could open the
door for other such cases.

"This is about as strong a case as there is," said Ms. Mariner, of Human
Rights Watch. "If Dillard loses this one, it will be hard to avoid the
conclusion that there's no point taking these cases to court."

The Human Rights Watch report documents just how common and brutal prison
rape can be — and how it can escalate into repeated assaults and even
slavery, in which inmates are sold or rented to other inmates for sex. The
report also establishes that many men, rather than being beaten into
submission, are coerced into sexual submission by those who seem to offer
protection in a gang- ridden and terrifying environment.

The study began in 1996, with announcements of the research project in
Prison Legal News and Prison Life Magazine, two publications widely
circulated in American prisons. Ms. Mariner was soon deluged with more than
a thousand letters from inmates, many of them detailing rapes.

One Texas inmate, whose experience was documented in the Human Rights Watch
report, was raped by another prisoner eight times from July through November
1995. The first time he was raped, the inmate said, he told the prison
chaplain, who had him write a statement for the prison's internal affairs
department, whose investigator brought him into a room with the rapist and
asked what happened. The inmate repeated his accusation, he said, but after
the rapist said it had been consensual sex, the investigator sent both men
to their cells, telling them he was not interested in "lovers' quarrels."

The rapes continued, becoming increasingly violent, the inmate said, adding
that although he filed several grievances, they were rejected. On the last
day of December, he said, the rapist attacked him with a combination lock in
a crowded prison dayroom, threatening to kill him.

The inmate has no memory of the attack, the report says, but others in the
dayroom watched as he was raped and beaten so forcefully that he suffered a
concussion and a broken neck, jaw, collarbone and finger. The rapist hit him
so hard with the lock that the word "Master" — the brand of lock — could be
read on his forehead, and four years later, the circular mark was still
visible to the Human Rights Watch researchers. The rapist was never
prosecuted.

The consequences of prison rape go beyond immediate physical injuries. Some
inmates contract AIDS through rape.

Kendell Spruce, an Arkansas prisoner serving time on a fraudulent- check
conviction who said he was raped by more than 20 inmates in one year and
contracted AIDS as a result, sued prison officials, charging cruel and
unusual punishment.

The prison warden, Willis Sargent, testified in Mr. Spruce's lawsuit that
prisoners bore the responsibility for fighting off sexual advances, by
letting others know they were "not going to put up with that."

A Federal District Court found that even if the warden should have known of
the risks to Mr. Spruce, his actions did not amount to deliberate
indifference, the standard for holding him accountable. An appeals court
reinstated the accusations against the warden and the case against him is
continuing. Mr. Spruce's accusations against two other officials were
dismissed.

Even men who suffer no serious physical consequences are profoundly shaken
by the experience of rape, some sinking into depression or attempting
suicide, the Human Rights Watch report says. Many tell of deep shame that
they did not put up enough resistance.

"I feel that maybe some women might look at me as less than a man," said one
inmate. "My pride feels beaten to a pulp."

In recent years, some correctional systems, including those in North
Carolina, Arkansas and Massachusetts and the San Francisco jails, have taken
action to train prison officials to prevent inmate rape and to respond when
it happens by seeking criminal charges against the perpetrators and medical
and psychological attention for the victim. But these initiatives are the
exceptions.

"We all know that when a woman is raped, it's a serious, traumatic event,"
Ms. Mariner said. "But it's at least as serious for men. They need to talk
about it. They need counseling. Prison staff needs to respond appropriately
to inmates who have been threatened with rape or actually assaulted. And we
all need to recognize that this is a deeply rooted systemic problem."

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Reiner Stensgaard Goldau
Ydbyvej 184
DK	7760	Hurup Thy
Denmark
+45-97-407628
goldau@adslhome.dk

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