Die-hard supporters - of the Lucasville Five protesting outside the Youngstown supermax.

Fourteen years ago, one of the bloodiest prison riots in Ohio history took place at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Five men were sentenced to death and remain on death row, for what prosecutors allege was their role as primary instigators during the riot. However, a small but growing movement is trying to obtain new trials, and suggests that prosecutors might have been more interested in vengeance than justice.

IT WAS EASTER Sunday, April 10, 1993. A group of Muslim inmates in SOCF were irate that they might have to take vaccine injections that contained a form of alcohol, a violation of their faith. Siddique Abdullah Hasan became spokesman for the Sunni Muslim prisoners. They had in mind a past SOCF incident in which some prisoners took a few guards hostage, called the media and were successful in being heard, without any casualties.

Along the way, however, the Muslim inmates' plans turned into almost 400 prisoners taking over an entire cellblock.

The uprising lasted 11 days. Also caught up in the frenzy were leaders of the Black Gangster Disciples and the Aryan Brotherhood. Several guards were immediately taken hostage, including Robert Vallandingham, who was subsequently strangled by a small team of prisoners. Nine inmates also were killed during the siege.

The rioters finally surrendered after officials agreed to review their demands. Damages totalling $40 million had been done inside the facility. Outside, anger and bitterness raged. The Ohio State Penitentiary — the only supermax in Ohio, and with 504 beds in 23 hours of solitary confinement — was built in Youngstown as part of an attempt to thwart prisoner violence (those seen as the worst inmate offenders are now sent there).

Prosecutors were overcome with the question: Who killed Vallandingham? It took them almost two years to identify witnesses and bring murder charges carrying the death penalty against Siddique Abdul Hasan, George Skatzes, James Were and Jason Robb. Keith LaMar was charged with leading a death-squad that killed co-prisoners. These men have come to be known as the Lucasville Five.

Siddique Abdullah Hasan now sits in solitary confinement all but one hour of every day. His death-row cell in the Youngstown supermax prison is no larger than a parking space. The jail doors are solid steel.

Before the Lucasville riot, Hasan was a Sunni Muslim imam inside the prison. He'd arrived in 1984, and was serving out a 10- to 25-year sentence for aggravated robbery.

Because of good behavior, Hasan had been assigned to live in an honor block and was taking vocational classes. At the time of the riot, he was a year and a half away from his next parole hearing.

Though Hasan is still in jail, he's busier than ever. The 44-year-old writes and receives dozens of letters in his supermax cell. He needs to convince more people that he was convicted on jailhouse snitch testimony that's since been recanted or contradicted, and without the advantage of alternative witness accounts.

So almost every day, Hasan writes. He posts regular missives on a Web portal, prisonersolidarity.org (which he also edits), to communicate between prisoners and those on the outside. And he constantly sends letters to possible supporters.

That's how, six months ago, one such Hasan letter arrived in the post office box of a Cleveland anti-war group, People's Fight Back Center (a local activities arm of the national Workers World Party) and got the attention of Sharon Danaan.

Danaan is a matronly 56 years old, with a pink, pudgy face. She just became a grandma to twins and is an OSHA inspector by day. She's also active in the anti-war and anti-death penalty movements around town.

Danaan joined PFBC a few years ago and was at a branch meeting when members read Hasan's letter — handwriting on a small slip of paper accompanied by photocopied articles about his case — pleading for the group's assistance. "I remembered the prison rebellion," Danaan says, "but nothing about the trials."

There was enough in Hasan's letter for Danaan to start poking around. She first Googled Hasan's name and up popped the name Staughton Lynd, an anti-death penalty and civil rights attorney.

Lynd, who in 2004 published Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising, based in part on more than 20,000 pages of trial transcripts and interviews with witnesses, has been arguing for new trials in all the Lucasville Five cases. Recently, he's been doing so with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lynd's book propelled Danaan into yet another grassroots odyssey. "[The Lucasville Five] were political prisoners in Ohio," Danaan says, "and they needed a campaign."

Danaan called up Lynd. She wanted to organize a protest outside the Youngstown supermax where four of the Lucasville Five were being held.

In Youngstown, Danaan also ran into Dwight LaMar, a Maple Heights-based truck driver and the uncle of Lucasville Five prisoner Keith LaMar (also known as Bomani Shakur). Dwight was always in Youngstown to visit his nephew and had also helped Keith write Condemned, a book about the riot.

"Imagine my excitement," Danaan says of the meeting. "There [in Dwight] you had the basis to form a defense committee."

Like Danaan, almost anyone who gets involved to help the Lucasville Five relies heavily on Staughton Lynd's research, which portrays the witnesses who testified against Hasan (formerly known as Carlos Sanders) as desperate men.

By the time Kenneth Law testified as a government witness against Hasan, Law had already been convicted of kidnapping Vallandingham. According to Lynd, Law was told by prosecutors that he would be retried for Vallandingham's murder unless he gave testimony that prosecutors knew was false. During Hasan's trial, Law fingered Hasan as the one who had ordered Vallandingham's death. This was the basis of Hasan's subsequent conviction and death sentence.

But in a 2000 affidavit, Law recanted. "This Å  is to expose the scandal executed by the Ohio State Patrol and the prosecutors involved in the SOCF riot investigation," Law wrote. "Myself Å  and another inmate talked regularly about regaining our freedom. We knew that information in the Vallandingham murder was the key to the door."

rain or shine - Supporters keep vigil in Youngstown.

All of the above is cited in a federal court brief filed by the ACLU and Staughton Lynd on behalf of Hasan. In interviews with the Free Times, Lynd gives similar tales of questionable snitch testimony in the other four Lucasville cases as well, undertaken with the full knowledge of prosecutors.

Like that of Roger Snodgrass who agreed to testify against Hasan, Robb, Were and Skatzes. Snodgrass pleaded guilty to murdering a fellow inmate, but guard-kidnapping charges were dropped. In 1994, Snodgrass was sentenced to five to 25 years. He was set free in September.

So hungry were prosecutors for convictions in the death of Vallandingham, the ACLU brief states, that they willfully overlooked accounts from eight other witnesses who instead pointed to a lead member of the Black Gangster Disciples, Anthony Lavelle, as the chief architect in Vallandingham's murder. All because Lavelle agreed to cooperate as a state's witness, Lynd says, while those now on death row did not.

"There has been evidence that's come out, in all of their cases, that the state wasn't forthcoming, or that the state manipulated evidence," says Mike Brickner, a spokesman for the ACLU. "We want new trials to determine if these people are really guilty."

Skatzes and Were are still trying to convince state appellate courts that they deserve a new trial. Hasan, LaMar and Robb have lost their state-level appeals, and are now trying with federal judges.

In December, Sharon Danaan and Dwight LaMar formally created the Cleveland Lucasville Five Defense Committee. They started by e-mailing 450 of their closest friends.

A vigil outside the Youngstown supermax took place in January against both the death penalty and the Lucasville Five's incarceration.

These days, about half a dozen people gather monthly at the ACLU's Cleveland office.

The Toledo chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty is also setting up a Free Siddique Abdullah Hasan Coalition. George Skatzes is circulating an online petition for support, and his sister speaks out and collects information that could prove his innocence in Vallandingham's death.

In Danaan's group, talk centers around how to engage new Ohio Governor Ted Strickland's higher level aides on death penalty issues, and how to generate publicity and support for the Lucasville Five. Members of the defense committee have made local presentations, and Dwight has appeared on local radio shows. Danaan also wants a statewide network that can be mobilized to attend upcoming evidentiary hearings in federal court.

Lately, the defense committee has been meeting almost weekly, as they're hosting former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, who is doing a multi-city speaking tour through Ohio on behalf of the Lucasville Five. (Keith LaMar's self-published book, Condemned, will be available at Brown's talk.)

And then there's the play Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising, entirely based on Staughton Lynd's book, dramatized by Gary Anderson. The lawyer and playwright came together last summer, after Lynd handed Anderson a copy.

"It was a slam-down book," says Anderson, who finished Lynd's 200-page tome in a few days. "Using uncorroborated snitch testimony is a cancer in our justice system."

Anderson, who also wrote the one-man play Clarence Darrow: The Search for Justice, about the famous 20th century anti-death penalty lawyer, was convinced Lynd's work could be dramatized.

Lucasville and Darrow begin a joint eight-city tour on April 11 — to coincide with the 14th anniversary of the uprising — and end in Cleveland on April 28. The plays are being widely publicized by the ACLU. And with many of the theater venues turning out to be Unitarian churches, Lynd says, advocates like himself are able to reach yet another ready-made audience.

The performances, with discussion sessions afterward, will also help create grassroots groundswells, Lynd says. The hope is that more and more people in Ohio will do some serious probing, he says.

Lucasville Five inmate Keith LaMar's uncle, Dwight, gets on his cell phone somewhere on an American highway. His semi's engine roars in the background. In recent years, Ohio has become second to Texas in its frequency of executions.

A 2002 study by Columbia Unversity law professor James Liebman, titled, "A Broken System: Why There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases, and What Can Be Done About It," found that when state trial judges are elected, as they are in Ohio, public opinion on the death penalty sways judges, and results in higher error rates in capital cases.

Between 1973 and 1995, about one quarter of Ohio's death sentences were overturned on appeal. The main reasons: evidence suppression by police and prosecutors, attorney incompetence, misinformed juries and biased judges.

The word is getting out, Dwight says. People are getting involved, getting interested and asking questions. "Before," he says, "people just said, "Yeah, they did it,'" about death row inmates, but nothing more.

For more information on the April 4 Cleveland event, call Sharon Danaan at 216. 571.2518.

For information on other Ohio lecture dates and locations, call Saadiqah Amatullah Hasan at 419.514.7634.

For information on the Cleveland Lucasville Five Defense Committee, call Sharon Danann at 216.481.6671.