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San Francisco, USA:
Friday March 23, 2001
By Maura Dolan, Times Legal Affairs Writer (L.A. Times)

The California Supreme Court refused Thursday to allow condemned inmates
to keep a personal spiritual advisor by their side right
up to the moment they are led away to their execution.

The court unanimously upheld a prison rule that requires spiritual
advisors to leave the condemned inmate 45 minutes before the execution.
Prison officials said the regulation is needed to protect the identities
of the execution team. The rule was not enforced for
at least two executions because of a lower court order against it.

An attorney for Robert Lee Massie, who is scheduled to die by
lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday at San Quentin state prison, said
Massie had hoped to have an Episcopal priest with him until shortly before
his execution.

The attorney, Frederick Baker, said Massie is a "spiritual man"
and values the guidance of his advisor, the Rev. Bruce R. Bramlett.
"I just think he feels it would be a comfort for him going into
the last hour to have him there to talk to," Baker said.
The state high court ruled Thursday in the case of Thomas M.
Thompson, who was executed in 1998. An Orange County Superior Court judge
had prevented prison authorities from removing Thompson's spiritual
advisor before Thompson entered the execution chamber.

In an opinion written by Justice Joyce Kennard, the court said Thursday
the trial judge erred because the regulation was
"reasonably related to legitimate penological interests."
"Many, perhaps most, religions view the last minutes of life as
a time when the need for spiritual advice and comfort is
particularly compelling," Kennard wrote in Thompson vs.
Department of Corrections. "But prisoners do not enjoy the unrestricted
freedom of choosing the time, place and manner of practicing their
religions."

State officials say time without the spiritual advisor is needed
to prepare the condemned inmate before he or she is escorted to
the execution chamber. During that time, the execution staff
asks the inmate to change into a pair of blue jeans and a blue
shirt and attaches a heart monitor to the prisoner.
"If you can imagine, he is being asked to turn his attention
away from this world and the people who love him and get himself
physically ready to be executed," said Deputy Atty. Gen. Susan
Duncan Lee, who represented the state Department of Corrections
in the case. "Having someone there who does love him and prefers
that he live can be very distracting and can make it harder to
focus on the execution staff," she said. "The mood really does
change in the last few minutes when he is being asked to cooperate with,
in effect, his executioners."

But Jordan Eth, a San Francisco lawyer who represented Thompson
and his spiritual advisor, the Rev. Margaret Harrell, said
advisors calm inmates before execution and enhance security.
"The last minutes before death are of extreme spiritual
significance," Eth said. The state does allow the prison's
chaplain to accompany a condemned inmate until the prisoner
leaves his cell for the execution chamber. But Eth said inmates
prefer to have personal advisors they trust.

"You can have government-issued pants, you can have government-issued
socks," said Eth, but inmates shouldn't be required to have "a
government-issued spiritual advisor." Eth said he found it odd that the
state high court upheld a rule to protect the identity of the executioners
because a federal judge recently rejected that claim
in ruling that witnesses, including the news media, should be
permitted to view the entire execution.

That order is now before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court has not yet ruled on whether witnesses can watch
Massie's execution in its entirety or whether Massie will be
strapped down and have intravenous lines inserted when he is
behind closed curtains.

(Source - Los Angeles Times)

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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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Dove Prison Ministry International
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Page Updated Sun Apr 15, 2001 2:19pm EDT