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New discoveries about the Lucasville uprising
by Attorney Staughton Lynd
February 6, 2006

Dear friends in the media and others,

       I am giving a talk at the Eisenhower Center on the Mansfield campus of Ohio State University at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday February 23 about "The Lucasville Uprising: New Discoveries."

       The new material supplements my book Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising, published in August 1994.

       In the talk I continue to argue that the judicial process for Lucasville defendants has been so flawed that, as in New York State after Attica, the State of Ohio should declare a general amnesty.

       Specifically, I show the following. 1. Among the 26,000 persons in southern Ohio who signed petitions and letters in 1993 calling for use of the death penalty in Lucasville cases were at least four trial jurors in State v. Scales and State v. Wells, and seven former hostage correctional officers who testified in a number of trials. One of these officers, Darrold Clark, advocated arming guards at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility and told the governor: "Shoot one of those suckers and they'll back off from a riot." 2. Defendant Cannon was convicted on the basis of testimony by a jailhouse informant who alleged facts that the prosecution knew or should have known to be physically impossible, and defendant Skatzes was sentenced to death for two murders, one now known to have been committed by others, and the second involving a single massive blow to the head that two other prisoners were also held to have committed. 3. Justice Pfeifer of the Ohio Supreme Court has flagrantly violated the Code of Judicial Conduct by publicizing his views on particular cases in newspaper columns while those cases were still on appeal. Indeed Judge Pfeifer published a pervasively erroneous narrative of the evidence in the Skatzes trial under the headline "Ohio inmate deserves death" in the official newspaper of three courts to which Skatzes will predictably appeal, including the Ohio Supreme Court on which Pfeifer sits.

       I am sending you this material more than two weeks in advance of the talk so that, to whatever extent you desire, you can verify my assertions by means of the backup materials or otherwise.

       The talk and backup materials [are linked below]:

       MANS.doc is my talk in Word;

       PetitionsAL.pdf is a memo by Attorney Alice Lynd describing her research on the petitions, together with illustrative petitions and a trial jury venire, in pdf because the documents had to be scanned (yet to be updated);

       StargerCannonMemo.doc is a memo in Word by Attorney Colin Starger of the New York Innocence Project on the trial and appeals of Derek Cannon;

       PfeiferLetter.pdf is my 16-page single-spaced letter to Justice Pfeifer, detailing both his violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct and his misrepresentation of the facts in the Skatzes trial;

       JudicialConduct.pdf is the newspaper article signed by Justice Pfeifer and entitled, "Ohio inmate deserves death for role in 1993 Lucasville riot," and Canon 3 of the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct.

       Please feel free to use this material in any way you consider appropriate. I would be happy to answer any questions. Please contact The Free Press for Staughton Lynd's contact information.

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