Corcoran murderers walk

by MC12

Eight California prison guards were acquitted June 9 of violating 
prisoners civil rights by staging fights at Corcoran prison and 
then shooting the fighting prisoners. After a nine-week trial and 
a studiously inept prosecution, the jury took just six hours to 
reach its unsurprising, but infuriating, verdict.

The state corrections department used to have a policy of mixing 
prisoners with grudges against each other during recreation. The 
guards used that policy to set up gladiator-like fights between 
prisoners. They would often then shoot the prisoners, supposedly 
to stop the fights that they set up in the first place. From 1989 
to 1994, 7 prisoners were killed and 43 seriously wounded in such 
shootings.(1)

The federal government prosecuted some guards for civil rights 
violations, but their case was doomed from the start, partly 
because of their approach. The prosecutors just went after the 
individual guards, who are extremely popular among the local 
population. That means they never attacked the state corrections 
policy, and the guards were able to use the policy as a defense.

The other reason the case was doomed was the jury. One juror, 
Charlene Hefner of Bakersfield, is married to a retired guard from 
Tehachapi Prison. Another, Dorene Delt, is a Madera County jail 
corrections officer.(2) Still another juror's application to be a 
state prison guard was pending when the trial began.(1) After the 
verdict was announced, jury foreman William Lee posed for pictures 
with the defendant prison guards, and another juror collected the 
guards' autographs.(2)

More and more of rural Amerika works in the booming prisons 
industry. These communities are united in their hatred of the 
prisoners, which the guards' defense attorneys used in the trial. 
Only six months before this trial, a local jury acquitted four 
other Corcoran guards accused of setting up the rape of a 
prisoner.(1) In that case the prosecutors put prisoner witnesses 
on the stand to testify, and that was said to work against their 
case. This time the prosecutors avoided prisoner testimony to try 
to stay on the racist jurors' good side.

The state corrections bureaucracy stood behind the guards, as did 
their union. "I can sleep a lot better now," said California 
Department of Corrections Director Cal Terhune after the trial.(1)

The injustice system is playing good-cop bad-cop in these trials. 
They put on a show of prosecution, but they're not anxious to 
convict anyone. In the meantime, the state has changed the policy 
and there haven't been fatal shootings in Corcoran. So the federal 
government just used this case to ease the more rabid state 
officials into line and to avoid costly lawsuits.

MIM calls the system itself, as well as the murderous guards, 
guilty of crimes against the people. And we work toward the day 
when the oppressed and their allies will impose justice on this 
system.

Notes:

1. Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2000, p. A1

2. San Francisco Chronicle, 10 June 2000, p. A1