was severely overcrowded. The prisoners were paid pennies for their work. The food was inedible. Medical care was virtually nonexistent, as were the programs that prisons were supposed to offer by way of rehabilitation. During the uprising thirty hostages—all of them prison employees—were taken and then released, completely unharmed, in return for a pledge that there would be no administrative or physical retaliation against the leadership of the uprising. That pledge was immediately broken by the prison administration.
By the time I was contacted about the situation at Auburn, the prisoners who had taken part in the uprising were in desperate need of help. After being moved out of Auburn, the six key leaders had been indicted for a long list of felonies and then returned to the prison where the alleged crimes took place to await trial. The venue for the trial was Auburn’s courthouse—not a particularly inmate-friendly venue. A young lawyer named Jeffrey Glen, from Mobilization for Legal Services, had been trying to put together a legal team to help the Auburn Six, who were not only segregated from the rest of the prison population but placed in “the Tank,” where they reported continuous abuse at the hands of guards in retaliation for the uprising. Glen initiated a federal case against the then newly minted state commissioner of correctional services, Russell Oswald, who was either unaware of the torture being inflicted on the Auburn Six or didn’t care.
“It isn’t only that they’re not going to be able to participate in their own defense,” Glen told me. “They may not survive what’s happening to them in the Tank.”
What came next I knew all too well from my time at the NAACP. The lawyers had a lot of heart, but they didn’t have much trial experience. Without a Movement lawyer, they were in over their heads. Meanwhile, lives were in danger.
The judge who would try the case upstate was Edmund Port, a former United States attorney. It wasn’t his job to protect criminals from the penal system. In general judges were not very friendly to prisoners. When inmates took over the prisons selected to punish them, they couldn’t expect much relief from the court. Asked to come and try the case, I found it impossible to refuse. That said, I definitely felt as if I was betraying a loyalty—namely mine to Kitty. I tried my best to wriggle out of it.
“You can squeeze it in,” Glen said. “Once you get us up and going and we see what the drill is, we’ll be fine.”
I couldn’t say no.
On March 9 we started the nonjury trial before Judge Port. On the first day Glen and another lawyer, Elizabeth Fisher, called to the stand three of the Auburn Six, all of them named as plaintiffs against Commissioner Oswald. After brief testimony on the conditions in the Tank, the deputy state attorneys drilled into the prisoners, subjecting them to long cross-examinations. While this was happening, I managed to talk by telephone to a psychiatrist, William Tucker, who had seen our lead plaintiff, Robert Clark, on a few occasions and had inspected conditions in the Tank himself. Despite Tucker’s strong reluctance to testify against the state, he agreed to come to the courthouse, and I put him on the stand.
“Did you treat Robert Clark?” I asked Tucker.
“Yes, I treated Clark a few times after the uprising and before he was shipped to Attica.”
Then, in a sideways retreat, if there can be such a thing, Tucker lurched into a sort of bureaucratic avoidance, explaining that the guards were having a hard time carrying out the prison rules, and that, to compound matters, there was a great deal of revolutionary activity on the part of the prisoners. I let him talk it out before confronting him: “Didn’t you tell me yesterday that an atmosphere of terror prevailed?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
The otherwise impassive judge peered down from the bench, clearly taking that statement in—it had left a mark.
The Auburn Six had been brought into court in shackles, but there was nothing unusual about that or the fact that we only had time to prepare them to testify in a holding cell behind the courtroom and then, one by one, hustled them to the stand to tell their stories about being stripped naked twenty-four hours a day and locked in freezing cells, and how the windows were left open twenty-four hours a day. It was the middle of winter in upstate New York. We got them to talk about the near-starvation