April 11-21, 2013, will be the twentieth anniversary of the prison uprising at Lucasville, Ohio, in 1993.

    A conference on "Re-Examining Lucasville" will be held at Columbus State Community College in Columbus on April 19-21.  Among the presenters will be Attorney Niki Schwartz, who helped to arrange the peaceful surrender that ended the rebellion, and Dean Phyllis Crocker of the Cleveland Marshall law school, who chaired the American Bar Association inquiry into capital punishment in Ohio in 2007.

    In preparation for the forthcoming conference, a number of individuals and media organizations have requested interviews with alleged leaders of the 1993 rebellion who are sentenced to death.  Those seeking interviews include James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, journalists whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Guardian, and many other print and online publications.  The convicted prisoners sought to be interviewed are:  Siddique Abdullah Hasan (formerly known as Carlos Sanders), Keith LaMar, and Jason Robb, at the Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) in Youngstown; and George Skatzes at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.

    For the past twenty years, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) has denied all requests for interviews with prisoners convicted of misconduct during the Lucasville disturbance.  In 2003, then-ODRC director Wilkinson told reporters for the Columbus Dispatch that "no inmates convicted of [Lucasville] riot crimes will be permitted to speak to us"  In 2006, OSP warden Ralph Houk wrote to playwright Gary Anderson, "I am denying your visitation.. . .  Our research of your background leads us to believe that your visit is for research purposes relating to your play."  We believe these denials are based on the expected content of the requested interviews.

    Attached is a legal memo providing a sketch of the law concerning media access to prisoners, a summary of facts relevant to visits with Lucasville defendants, and a description of the process by which an interview should be requested.

    We hope that you will join us in seeking to uncover the facts concerning causes of the Lucasville uprising, and what happened during the 11-day occupation of L-block and in the trials that followed.

    Do not hesitate to communicate with me by e-mail or at (330) 652-9635 should if it seem helpful to do so.  And if you decide to seek an interview, we would appreciate receiving copies of your request and the response of the  authorities.                            

Attorney Staughton Lynd

Author, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a

    Prison Uprising (Temple University Press, 2004)