Mark Your Calendars

The Revolutionary Black Panther Party will hold an armed march against genocide in St. Louis, Missouri, an open-carry weapons state, on August 5, to honor Angelo Brown, also known as General Houdari Juelani, the local party leader who was shot dead by police in nearby Belleville, Illinois, last month. The party also plans “to file human rights violations with the International Criminal Court and the World Court,” according to Chief General in Charge Dr. Ali Muhammad. Juelani died from a single bullet to the temple, but his face showed signs that he had been beaten before death.

  Black Agenda Report

In other Panther news...

Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, a former Black Panther who escaped from Pennsylvania prisons twice in the 1970s, was held in solitary confinement for nearly thirty-three years, including twenty-two consecutive years, from 1991 to 2014. During that time, Shoatz was in confined to his cell, in complete social isolation, for 23-24 hours a day. He contends that his time in solitary has lead him to develop severe mental health issues, including chronic depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and more–and that the length of time he was held in isolation was based, at least in part, on his political beliefs.

[...]

Shoatz was diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia and depressive disorder and transferred to Fairview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1980, he was able to briefly pull off an escape from Fairview. When he was caught and put back in prison, he began the first of his many long stints in solitary confinement.

[...]

Shoatz [...] was found guilty of a first-degree murder [in 1972] that was part of a 1970 Black Liberation Army attack on a Philadelphia police station, which resulted in the death of one officer and the injury of another. In 1977, Shoatz and several other prisoners overtook a cell block, injuring several guards with a knife, and escaped from prison.

[...]

>While in solitary, Shoatz was kept in a 7 x 12-foot cell.

[...]

Despite his apparently deteriorating mental health, entire decades passed without the prison giving Shoatz a mental health evaluation.

[...]

Shoatz was only allowed out of his cell for one hour a day, five days a week, to exercise in a cage not significantly larger than a cell. This limited recreation time required an intrusive strip search, which made Shoatz anxious and caused him to rarely leave his cell during the small window of time he was afforded to do so.

[...]

Rubber strips surrounded the sides and bottom of the cell door, effectively making his cell a sensory deprivation chamber. The light of this cell remained on 24 hours a day, a practice that Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist serving as an expert witness before the court, called “a well-known method of torture,” in his declaration for the court.

  

Thirty-three years of solitary. Twenty-two in a row.  Severe mental health issues, indeed.

He has recently won a lawsuit whereby an agreement was reached with the Pennsylvania prison authorites "that they will never again place him in solitary confinement." (Black Agenda Report)