Part 1 of the interview is here.

by Alixa Garcia – Arise for Assata Project

Q: Could you tell us exactly what happened when you first went to court in your first trial? What were the charges that were brought against you and exactly how did the state deal with prosecuting you in this particular case?

AS: The first trial that I participated in was the New Jersey trial. They put in a whole lot of other charges like armed robbery – I was supposed to have robbed the police of guns – and then assault, and whole list of charges. But the main charges were murder of a New Jersey state policeman and wounding another one. We were on trial, we were in the jury selecting process.

Q: When you say “we,” could you state exactly who –

AS: Sundiata Acoli and I were on trial together. We had the same charges and we decided that we would go on trial together. They didn’t oppose that.

Q: Had you recovered from your wounds at the time?

AS: I was still wearing a brace for the broken clavicle, but the problem was mainly my right arm. I was basically paralyzed. And I was a wreck. I’d broken out in a rash, I was very thin… Anyway, we started the jury selection process. And in the middle of it the trial was stopped. It was postponed until January, 1974.

Q: Why?

AS: Because it was found out that there was such a racist climate in the jury room that the trial could no longer proceed. There was like this lynch mob atmosphere, there was no way we could receive anything resembling a fair trial. So they gave us a change of venue to another county – Morris County – where we were supposed to resume the trial. Morris County happened to be 99% white and one of the richest counties in the state of New Jersey, as a matter of fact, in the whole country.

Q: What evidence was presented to indicate that there was a racist climate at that time?

AS: There was no evidence presented, but the press had been trying me for years. I was turned into a monster. They pictured this vicious woman that goes around terrorizing police, this madwoman essentially… They had created this whole mythology in order to destroy me. They started this whole mythology in order to destroy me. They started building this whole campaign in the press in 1970-71. The press were free to say anything and the police, the FBI, the CIA were the ones who were feeding the press information. No one ever asked me any questions and even attempted to deal with the fact that we were human beings, people who had a long history of struggle. It was just overwhelming, and people believed that.

Q: You notice that there was a correlation between the information the police had in their possession and the information and the distortions in the press?

AS: It wasn’t information. They just fabricated things, and fed them to the press. They would accuse me of having I don’t know how many pending charges, and none of that was true. Anybody reading the paper would think that we had been convicted of committing so many crimes all around the country and never was there a mention that we’d never been found guilty of any crime.

Q: You said that the trial was suspended because you could not get an impartial jury panel. Did you have the opportunity to select a jury of your peers when the trial was recommenced?

AS: No. The jury selecting process was biased. Most of the Blacks who were prospective jurists were gotten rid of by the prosecution. Then, people who obviously were prejudiced, and obviously thought that I was guilty, were included in the jury. At the second trial in New Jersey there was a severance and I went to trial alone. The judge would say: “Well, can you put your opinion aside? Can you follow the law as I give it to you? Can you listen to my instructions and come to a verdict?” Even though a poll was taken that showed that 70% of the people of Middlesex County believed that I was guilty and had heard of the case through the media, the judge said it was a fair trial and there was no prejudice. I was tried and convicted by an all-white jury, a jury that was clearly prejudiced in favor of the prosecution. The jury was sequestered but the police and the jurors kept intermingling freely. The same thing happened in Sundiata’s case. One of the black jurors in his case tried to really come forth but they beat her down. There was a real investigation of the way in which the police interacted with the guards, the court officers interacted with jurors while they were sequestered, and especially in cases where the defendant is charged with the killing of a police officer, that’s a tool of influencing the jury.

Q: In December of 1978 your attorney, along with other organizations and groups, filed a petition in the UN Commission on Human Rights, alleging a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights in regard to prisoners in the U.S. Your case was one of those that were cited, and you were visited by a group of international jurists and attorneys. Could you tell us exactly what type of unit you were housed in and for how long and under what conditions?

AS: Well, I spent two and a half years – maybe more – in these prisons. After I was convicted in 1977 I was taken to Quentin prison for women for about a week, and after that I was transferred to Yardsville, which is an all-men’s prison. Not a jail, a prison. They gave me a booklet: “These are the rules for the New Women’s Unit at Yardsville Prison.” I was the only woman in the New Women’s Unit and they told me that I was going to be there for the rest of my life. They got a prison psychologist to testify that I was a hardened revolutionary and that no amount of time in solitary confinement would bother my mental health whatsoever. I was kept in this – it was like a cage – within a completely isolated section of the prison. There were two guards in front of the cell at all times, lights at all times.

Q: Were these female guards?

AS: No. Male and female guards. In front of my cell, writing down everything, you know: ‘Subject is now eating. Subject is now on the toilet. Subject is now reading’ – everything I did they wrote. I had no contact with the other prisoners, no access to the legal library, no access to any of the other educational facilities, no outside recreation whatsoever. No – my family visits were held in a filthy, nasty place – a search room for the normal prisoners. And so we had to sit in this filthy – and it was just unbearably filthy – room and have our visits, what few visits I was permitted to have. Lawyers’ visits also took place in that room. The other thing I talked about to the international lawyers was the fact that I had been sent to Alderson, West Virginia, which is a prison within a prison. Although I had no federal charges, there’s this agreement called the Interstate Contact Agreement, by which any person in order to settle their relationships with their family, with their community, can be shipped into the federal prison system anywhere in the country. Sundiata was sent to Marion prison, which is the worst concentration camp in the United States. Alderson was set up for the most “dangerous” women in the U.S., a maximum of 20. Two of them were Manson family women, one had been accused of attempted assault against President Ford, and the rest of the women – the overwhelming majority – were members of the Aryan Sisterhood, which is a fascist, Nazi organization. Even though the prisoner population in Alderson in general is overwhelmingly Black – Black, Latino, Asian – the control unit was all white, with the exception of me. I was there with thirteen or fifteen Nazis who wore swastikas embroidered on their jeans, who took pictures giving Hitler salutes. And I was there until the unit was closed down and I was shipped into the Hole…

Q: What is the Hole?

AS: The Hole is solitary confinement. It’s punitive segregation. Even though I had not been accused of any disciplinary infraction the whole time that I was there, I was thrown into the Hole while they were deciding what to do with me. They didn’t want me to be in the prison population, in any normal situation, so I had to stay in the Hole until they finally decided that they were going to ship me back to Quentin Prison. In Quentin Prison, immediately on my arrival, they closed the building that I was in, which meant that all of the women who worked in the prison, and were going to school or had jobs in the population lost their jobs and could only move around inside of maximum security building. All of the recreation programs women had been allowed to participate in – until I came – they lost all of that. And the prison administration would go around to the women saying: “She’s the reason that you’ve lost your job and are no longer able to get an education. She’s the reason why you are confined in this building 24 hours a day.” I could see that prison officials were trying to create a situation where the women would move on me. They had moved most of the women who had some kind of an insight as to what was going on to the other maximum security building, and had crowded the building where I was with women who were informers, who were tools of the administration or women who were just mad or who were absolute fools.

Q: So is it your view that the prison authorities tried to incline other inmates to physically attack you?

AS: Oh yes. They would incite these women constantly; they had their people moved to that building especially for that purpose, women who had no long-term sentences, no reason to be in that building, were sent there for the sole person of stirring up trouble. It got to the point where guards – Black guards – would say: “Don’t go outside today ‘cause they got something cooked up for you,” I would always listen to what the guards had to say with a grain of salt, but in certain instances I found out that they were saying the truth.

Q: According to the United States Constitution, everyone accused of a crime has the right to choose their own attorney, and if they do not have the funds to choose or to afford the attorney of their choice, they are then appointed an attorney by the court. This is the law of the land. The records reflect in your case, however, that one of your attorneys was mysteriously killed during the course of one of your trials. Could you explain to us the trial that you were attending, what happened, and what is known about that, how that impacted your ability to defend yourself?

AS: This happened in trial in Jersey. There was a consistent attack on my lawyers. They were being threatened with contempt, with being thrown off the case – that’s the first thing. Stanley Cohen, who was murdered, was one of the lawyers on that case. There is a myth that someone who’s accused of a crime has a right to a lawyer. The reality of it is that most people who have no money get lawyers who have no interest in their case, do no investigation, no work whatsoever. In my case, the state had millions of dollars at their command to prosecute me and we had no money whatsoever. We need experts to mount a defense, ballistic experts, because so much of the evidence – the so-called physical evidence – was manufactured. Things that appeared on discovery reports then disappeared, then appeared again, and it was obvious that all the evidence was tampered with. So we needed a forensic chemist, an investigator, ballistics experts, and we had absolutely no money. Finally, after the lawyers whooped and hollered, the judge gave an order granting some assistance in paying for the experts, even though it’s very difficult to find a ballistics experts or a forensic expert who doesn’t work for the police, especially if you’re being accused of murdering a police officer. Just finding one was a task in and of itself. Stanley Cohen had made some initial contacts and initial agreements with an investigator, and was en route to being able to deal with some of these experts and expose some of this tampered evidence – and the next thing I knew, he was found dead in his apartment. The cause of his death was never made public. The initial report said that he was a victim of trauma – but we never got the real cause of death, whether or not he was murdered. They finally said something about natural causes, but there never was a report of how he was killed. What we do know was that all of my legal records that were in his apartment were taken by the United States – no, by the New York Police Department – everything. They said that they took those – my legal records – as evidence. They didn’t say evidence of what. Evelyn had to like a lawsuit to get those legal records back. Different records were missing; all the notes that referred to investigations of the case were never found. Then, immediately after Stanley Cohen’s death, the judge retracted the orders saying that the state had to help us pay for these experts. The city’s order said that we hadn’t gotten these experts in time, and therefore the order was no longer good. William Kunstler was one of the lawyers on the case, and so was Lennox Hines; the next thing we knew, both of them were cited for contempt. The judge held a hearing to get Kunstler thrown off the case, because he was trying to raise money so we could pay the experts. Instead of even being able to prepare my defense, my lawyers were put in a position where they had to prepare their own defenses and that went on through my whole time in prison. Evelyn Williams – who was also my aunt – was my lawyer. She was cited for contempt, she was smitten with it daily, she spent time in prison for contempt, for no reason at all. That happened to most of my lawyers, if not all of them: they were all threatened. Lou Meyers, a lawyer from Mississippi, said that he would rather try a million cases in Mississippi than try one in New Jersey, because New Jersey was the most racist place he’s ever been in. But it wasn’t just New Jersey, it was New York, it was every place that I went to trial in. And it didn’t happen just to me; this was something that was repeated across the board in all cases that concerned political prisoners; on every single case the lawyers were harassed, the prisoners received the worst treatment.

Q: Was your family in any way harassed or intimidated by state authorities during this whole period?

AS: Absolutely. First, let me say that the prison authorities try to make the visits as uncomfortable as possible. They build prisons in places where it’s very hard to visit. Families have to spend hours in line, just waiting to get in, standing out in the cold. There are no facilities for them, often nothing to drink. When my daughter was tiny, my mother would bring her to visit me, and the guards would say: “She can’t have milk. She can’t have diapers.” Just insane things to make life so much more difficult. My family was subjected to police harassment on every level. My mother had a heart attack because the police went to her job, they tried to storm the door. Surveillance cameras, phone bugs, devices, strange phone calls at all hours of the night playing forged recordings of my voice, all this stuff they suffered because they were my family. They couldn’t just sit and have a conversation in the house, everything was being recorded. Part of the car’s motor would fall off and then they would take it to the garage and see that it had been mysteriously sawed; tires would be slashed. Letters, all kinds of letters, from police agents, threatening letters – it was just an onslaught of harassment, meant to break them down and destroy our family unity, trying to turn us against each other, trying to scare them to death so that they would be afraid even to have a relationship with me. But it didn’t work. We survived it, and I think that our family is stronger as a result of that. We resisted together, and we struggled together, and that has made us – all of us – much more serious about who we are and about our love for each other.