On March 19, 2009, a Canadian citizen, attempted in peace, to arrest War Criminal Bush and enforce the War Crimes Act. It seems that the police got confused and arrested the citizen, Splitting the Sky, aka John Boncore, who is standing trial for his "impertinence" or "misguided sense of civil duty" this week.
"Who is going to arrest or not arrest George W. Bush? I propose a world court whose jurisdiction grows from the shared global citizenship of all human beings on the planet.
~ Splitting the Sky
This morning a reader wrote me asking me what I believed in. (Thank you Stephen, it was reaffirming to just let the words flow to you without editing!) I answered him as best I could but then I found this piece waiting for me in my mailbox.
I would say that the spirit of this man, Splitting the Sky, is certainly something in which I firmly believe when I speak of the essential strength and goodness of humankind and the fact that, if we are aware, we do have the wherewithall to fight for what we believe in, what is being stolen from us.
We see this same strength in the people of Bi'lin every week as they walk in peace into the guns of IDF hatred weekly in their struggle to maintain their lives. Here we see that same spirit in a Canadian native man who has been well honed by the fires of adversity.
Please meet Splitting the Sky, a truly honorable Canadian of whom we should all be extremely proud. I remember all of the events he mentions, but as a sheltered white person, I only knew what the mainstream media told us at the time, although I was very sensitive to racial issues. But often the Canadian press never even mentioned these events.
Now, older and more politically savvy, it is wonderful to hear the truth from someone who really was there. 
A Radical Interview with John Splitting the Sky,
Gustafsen Lake Defender
Vol. 3 No. 3 The Radical, October, 2000
By Arthur Topham
RadicalPress.com
Part One
The Radical is most appreciative for having the opportunity to present the following interview with John Splitting the Sky Hill. As readers are about to realize Mr. Hill has led a most remarkable life; one fraught almost from the onset with challenges, dangers and responsibilities that the average person would cringe at the thought of having to endure.
For all of John’s trials though, he has emerged ~ tempered by the fires of life ~ as a leading spokesperson for native sovereignty issues and a living example of the persevering spirit of resistance that has kept the aboriginal people of this continent strong.
In short it’s an abbreviated odyssey, an epitomizing epic of one man’s struggle to maintain his dignity and spirit in a world where native traditional values are no longer given the respect and honour that they once knew. John Splitting the Sky Hill’s story of how he survived a brutal prison system in New York state only to end up playing a major role in the Gustafsen Lake Stand off during 1995 will surely come as a major surprise to readers who only heard the one-sided reports that came from the corporate press during that time.
It’s a riveting tale with a message as relevant today as it was almost thirty years ago. Ed.)
RAD: John it’s now been almost 10 years since the Oka uprising occurred and 5 years since the stand-off at Gustafsen Lake just west of 100 Mile House, B.C. The incident at Gustafsen Lake in many ways marked a turning point here in British Columbia for the manner in which our provincial government conducted itself toward native disputes.
You and Wolverine, aka William Ignace or Jonesy were to play some major parts at Gusfafsen Lake. Hopefully this interview will allow Radical readers to gain a much clearer insight into what was going on behind the corporate media’s blockade of information that the general public were subjected to back then.
But prior to getting into that I would like to ask you if you could talk about your own personal history and how it was that a native rights activist like yourself, originally from New York state, USA ended up running a Sundance ceremony at Gustafsen Lake.
While in Vancouver for the Under the Volcano festival in mid-August I heard you speaking in a workshop. At that time you mentioned that you had been directly involved in the infamous Attica Uprising in New York back in 1971 and ended up being the only player in that incident that did time. Let’s begin then with some background on how it was that at the ripe old age of 19 you became involved in one of America’s most bloody uprisings of the last century.
StS: Well, at the time of this talk I’m 48 years old and I’ll be 49 next January. I was born in Buffalo, NY. My mother is from the Mohawk Nation in Branford, Ontario and so my roots are basically here in Canada. As well my Grandmother was a Cree woman from Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. So like I said my roots are in Canada but my mother married my father who was from Buffalo, NY.
He passed away though in 1957. He worked for U.S. Rubber and had been commissioned by the company, along with ten other men, to spray paint one of their utility tanks, these massive tanks that they had at the plant there. They had been told by the company that they didn’t need gas masks but all the eleven men ended up dying from toxic inhalation.
RAD: Oh, Christ!
StS: And so eleven of them died and it wasn’t too long after that the child welfare department in Buffalo came and snatched up me and my sisters and put us into the foster care system.
RAD: How old would you have been then?
StS: Well I was 7 years old then and my sisters were like 6, 5, 4 and 3 respectively. And from that point on we were all separated into different foster homes.
I then went through a number of boarding school situations and orphanages. The boarding schools were like the residential schools here in Canada in fact the residential schools pretty much got their ideas from the boarding schools in the states.
So having gone through those schools for a number of years and resisting the kind of abusive treatment and brutality that existed within these joints I began to gain a reputation for being what you would say was an “incorrigible” person. I detail a lot of this information in my soon to be released Autobiography of Splitting the Sky Along With My Wife Sandra Bruderer subtitled: From Attica to Gustafsen Lake.
In any event after a number of years in these reform schools and foster home situations I eventually was on my own at the age of 17 for the first time in my whole life. I’d just gotten out of a reform school called the NY State Agricultural & Industrial School for Boys. I didn’t have a place to stay. I’d been kicked out of this apartment and had been sleeping out in the streets for a couple of months and it was getting really cold.
One evening I decided that I’d had enough. I was hungry and had no money and so out of desperation I tried to stick up a store. I ended up bungling the robbery and being held by two Italian guys who were mob related. They gave me a submarine sandwich to eat while I waited for the police to come and apprehend me and put me in jail for stealing nothing. I got nothing in the robbery but I still got 4 years for attempted robbery. It was my first offense. I ended up in a place called Elmira State Reformatory and that was the beginning of my long sojourn in the NY state penal system.
By this time I was beginning to get pretty big and strong and learning to handle myself quite well and I refused to give in to the rigid authoritarianism that existed within these systems and the abuse that comes with it.
I thwarted off years of these kind of attacks and brutal regimentation against myself and so that’s how I gained this reputation for being incorrigible.
When I went to prison for this robbery I became politically active while in jail. I met a number of people from different areas; people from the Black Panther party, the Puerto Rican Liberation party, a number of people involved in native activism, anti-war activists. So while I was in there gaining all this political knowledge I began to use that time to educate myself and I began to study and talk with people about how the system works and how people have basically been victimized by the economic system that doesn’t meet the needs of the multitude of people but only the oligarchies that control the world.
And so I began to understand that we were essentially victims of this vicious economic system and subsequently everything that we have to do to survive basically creates a prison class type of person.
It’s the working class, grassroots type of people who end up in prisons and it’s usually because of property related crimes. I began to look at various revolutionary ideas and philosophies and began to study these ideas. We began to realize that we were victims of a system that didn’t meet our needs and so we started entertaining a lot of ideas about revolutionary resistance in order to overthrow it.
So being very angry as a result of the years of brutal attack and imprisonment and punitive measures being laid on you within the prison system with the various kangaroo courts and beatings that one is subjected to every time that you challenged authority I began to realize that I just wouldn’t be broken by that system. And so it became one of those abuser/victim situations and I guess it was really a recipe for creating revolutionary ideas for those within the prison system.
RAD: Did you spend the full 4 years in jail for that attempted robbery?
StS: I did just about all 4 years on that one, yes. While I was in there about 2 years later I had been transferred from Elmira Reformatory and I was sent to Attica State prison in 1971 sixteen days before the rebellion happened.
RAD: Could you talk about that rebellion and bring Radical readers up to speed on what really took place during that time?
StS: Sure I could. The conditions at Attica, like all the prisons in New York at that time, were very intolerable, to the point where prisoners were basically living on a per capita of 62¢ per day meaning that all your basic necessities for existence cost the prison administration only 62¢ a day to house you there.
This meant you had a very poor diet which included rancid food for the most part. You had no hot water in your cells. You had to bird bath after working in sweat shops all day long for 2¢ a day while the administration was making millions of dollars profits from prison slave labour. People could only take a shower once a week and your laundry was only done once a month!
Our Latino brothers didn’t have any access to mail. They couldn’t send or get letters because the prison was run by an all white administration and most of the white administrators were affiliated with neo-nazi organizations as well as active members of the Klu Klux Klan.
The Warden of the prison himself was known to be the Grand Imperial Wizard of the local klavern. His name was Vincent Mancusi. And so subsequently you had a very white, racist regime that made it a prison policy to beat you to death if you were incorrigible. There were a number of people that were brutally beaten right to death; smashed to death with what the guards called their “nigger sticks” if anyone challenged their authority.
So the stakes were much higher because once you were raised up to a state prison like Attica it was well known that I wouldn’t be able to get away with the sorts of behaviour that I’d been getting away with up to that point. Before then I was used to getting severe beatings but now in Attica I was facing the possibility of getting beat to death for having what they referred to as a militant attitude.
were committed and a number of killings that went unreported. People were being buried in unmarked graves, in prison walls and under cement foundations in new wings of the prison. This sort of stuff was a known fact amongst the inmates which basically kept everyone pretty much in a state of fear and panic all the time.
But like I was saying we were going through an era where people everywhere were becoming very anti-social and were challenging these regimes within the prison system as well as the government itself. People on the outside as well were no longer prepared to tolerate all the bullshit from the system per se.
So there were a lot of people coming into prison who were challenging issues about racism and sexism and taking part in the resistance against the anti-imperial, ant-colonial movement. They were bringing these issues in with them to the joint and so there was a lot of unrest within the prison and militancy on the rise. It seemed like most of us that had that sort of an attitude ended up at Attica and all in all it made for a very explosive situation.
Well what happened that set off this explosion was that there was a guy by the name of George Jackson who was a really powerful black writer and he was writing on the black liberation movement. He’d written two books, one called Blood In My Eyes and one called Letters From George. He was also a close friend of Angela Davis.
And she was involved with the shoot out with his brother Jonathan Jackson at the courthouse in California and that’s what she was on the run for during that time. He had become so known for his writings, all over the prison and he was basically saying destroy the system, tear it apart brick by brick and challenge the authorities who are upholding this capitalist structure. If governments had been meeting the needs of the people there wouldn’t be no need for prisons in the first place.
RAD: Exactly.
StS: So anyway, because he had such a powerful, militant voice I guess what they did was set him up. They said that he went into the visiting room at the prison and that when he came out of the visiting room he had a .38 tucked away in his asshole which was outright bullshit. And so they took the opportunity to start beating him up and then they killed him by pumping 20 to 30 slugs into him.
Bob Dylan wrote a song about him. “He only went to jail for a $75 robbery, Lord, Lord, they shot George Jackson down.” I don’t know if you remember that song but it was about George.
Anyways when all the different brothers and sisters across the country heard about what they’d done to George everybody had a national day of solidarity and mourning for the brother and everybody just kind of united and had a prayer ceremony for him. And then the next day everybody was planning a major food fast. Nobody was going to take food. It was going to be a food strike coupled with a work stoppage as well.
At Attica it was like about 100% of the whole prison population of around 1200 men. That kind of solidarity amongst the men of course scared the living shit out of the police in the prison even to the point where you could hear their chains rattling out of fear and nervousness. In fact in the mess hall there was complete silence. You didn’t hear the clattering of the plates of a thousand men eating at the same time mixed with all the talking. There was just complete silence. Everybody had white shirts on with black arm bands around them and nobody was taking food or saying anything, just going in and going out. That sort of solidarity scared the living shit out of the Beast.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Then, a couple of days later there was a football scrimmage going on and there was a white guy and a black guy scrimmaging and I guess this one lieutenant came out with a couple of the guards and thought that he’d seen the black guy hit the white guy in the scrimmage and so the lieutenant told the guards, “Lock that fuckin’ nigger up!”
The white guy told the lieutenant that they were just scrimmaging and that he ain’t no nigger and if they were going to lock up the black guy then they should lock him up too. So the lieutenant told the guards, “Lock that nigger lover up too.” And when the guard went to grab the black brother he smacked him in the mouth and that was it.
Everybody converged and just dropped what they were doing and surrounded him and showed him their support. That day the lieutenant promised not to lock him up but that night after everybody was locked back up they went around looking for people that were involved in that mutiny, including myself, because I ended up smacking the same lieutenant in the face because I’d said that he was a liar and that he was going to end up locking these guys up and throwing them into solitary confinement.
But he didn’t recognize who I was at that point because I’d only been there 16 days. I kinda just came out of the crowd and gave him a smack across the side of the head, a slap. So that night they pulled two guys out of their cells. These guys had thrown some cans of soup and broken bottles at the guards when they were walking down the hall and the one guard had got hit in the head with a can of soup.
The next day after everybody was coming out after breakfast the administration decided they were going to do a prison lock down. They had the doors locked where everybody usually went out into the yard before going to work. I was walking down the corridor with a guy by the name of Sam Melville. He was a guy that belonged to a white organization that was a revolutionary group called the Weathermen Underground. He was known as the Mad Bomber and he was sorta like a political mentor to me at that time. He was in prison for blowing up a number of different corporate buildings in the US along with a number of other sisters like Marilyn Buck, Lisa Van and Linda Horn who were also involved with the Weathermen.
So Sam asked them how come they locked those brothers up. There was a black brother there too with us who was part of the liberation army and I was right there standing next to them. The captain told Sam that he didn’t know why but that he’d check on it. Then the black guy told the captain, “Yah, well you’re full of shit” and he punched the guy and as he knocked the captain down. Sam Melville started stompin’ him in the ribs. I saw this happening and I just turned around and said well, this is it. Let’s take the goddam place. This is it. Let’s riot. The next thing you know there were 1200 men rioting all over the place.
It spread like a spark in a prairie fire. There were four sections to the prison and where the four hallways met in the centre there were four independent gates with locks controlling access to each hallway. Without getting through those other gates you couldn’t get to the other sections of the prison.
There were about four guards who were in the middle of that area that we called Times Square. They had the keys and so they locked all the gates leading into the different sections so that nobody could get through. There was about 30 or 40 of us in this one section and so what we did was start shaking the bars. It was a cast iron gate that was about 20 feet wide and we just kept shaking on it and pulling on it and rocking it back and forth and eventually we just ripped that gate right off the wall.
As the gate went down it hit one of the cops on the head. We got the keys and opened the other gates. There were 1200 men just coming from all over the place and grabbing prison guards and holding them. They put these guards into inmate garb and took them to holding areas where they were then held as hostages to be used in negotiations with the state of New York.
At that time Nelson Rockefeller was the Governor of New York. Anyways, one of the guards that had been in the Times Square area when the gates went down died two days later from his injuries and in 1971 I was charged with having killed this guy.
This cop that died his name was William Quinn. He was the determining factor in the 28 demands that we made to the state. The international press was allowed to come in. The Commissioner of New York state parole was a guy by the name of Russell G. Oswald. He actually had enough nerve to come into the prison and negotiate with us. We had state Senators John Dunn and we had Tom Wicker from the New York Times and a number of other people, Clarence [?] from the Amsterdam News and William Kunzler the constitutional lawyer.
RAD: Oh yes. William Kunzler the lawyer for the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial.
StS: Yes. So all these people came in as observers and William Kunzler was our lawyer and he eventually became my trial lawyer. So what happened was we had fifty hostages and we held them for about five days. And we had set up a negotiating team to maintain control of the prison day and night and these 1200 men basically formed and became a real tight, democratic process of negotiating with the state and our observers there and with the national and international media and so our situation was heard all around the world. For the very first time people around the world were starting to finally hear about what was really going on within America’s penal system.
We continued negotiating and 28 demands were met by the NY state but one; the demand where we were asking for amnesty from any criminal prosecution. We had all agreed that when the guard had died we were in fact all accessories to the crime and technically that’s how it would have read in the laws of New York state. We had also asked for the removal of Vincent Mancusi because he was the Grand Dragon of the invisible Clavorn over there in Attica.
We had also asked for transportation to a non-imperialistic country and 17 countries around the world had said that they’d receive us if the state would fly us out by helicopter but of course they weren’t going to do that.
Well, you know, you shoot for the moon and you settle for a piece of the rock. You know what I mean? So as far as our demands went we went sky high. We had put it to a vote and it was a unanimous decision of all 1200 men that we wouldn’t give up unless the state granted us a blanket amnesty from any criminal prosecution.
Subsequently we didn’t want to turn it into a reformist struggle. We wanted to keep it a purely revolutionary struggle and not fall prey to the whims of the status quo. But anyway we were caught in a negotiating posture and they wouldn’t negotiate the 29th demand. And so there we were.
They gave us the last ultimatum on September the 13th, 1971 to come out or they were coming in. And it just so happened that morning that during the same time that this was going on with us in upstate New York, in a place called Onondaga Reserve, the Onondaga Nation had called down the Mohawk warriors from Canada and upper upstate New York. About 600 armed warriors had come down to the Onondaga Reserve to help the people there defend their right to stop New York state from expanding a highway through the Onondaga Independent Sovereign territory which was part of the Six Nations confederacy.
That morning Governor Rockefeller had sent about 1000 state troopers to do gun battle with the Mohawk warriors up at Hwy 81 and the Onondaga Reserve just outside of Syracuse when suddenly they were called back to go to Attica. They turned them all around and when they went into Attica they positioned them on the rooftop.
People here were going through psychological warfare holding knives to the hostages throats and pretending that they’d go all the way and kill them if the troopers came in charging. They weren’t thinking that the state would send any gunslingers in while they had hostages in there knowing that their own could possibly be killed. Right? But that wasn’t the case. They’d made a decision to take the prison.
So next thing you know you could see up on top of the prison walls there’s like all these red coats. Not red coats like here in Canada but it had been raining lightly that morning and you could see all these red rain coats on the New York state troopers. Bright fluorescent red raincoats with red hats and they’re up on the roof top and they’re all in the hallways of the buildings that we didn’t take. And you could see them busting out windows and they had every kind of assault weapon you could possibly think of.
Then all of a sudden you could see this army helicopter rising up from behind the prison wall and hovering over the prison and all of a sudden the sound of this massive helicopter flying just directly over head with someone in it yelling over a bullhorn to give up the hostages and you wouldn’t be harmed.
They flew around like that two or three times and then on the third time around they dropped a canister of CN4 gas and when it hit the catwalk it exploded like a bomb throughout the whole prison. Then they dropped about 3 or 4 more canisters of this gas that had been banned by the Geneva Convention in 1906 as a cruel and unusual form of lethal force to be used in times of warfare. But they dropped it in Attica. This was excess stuff that they had tucked away in army bases in NY state.
After they released this canister it caused severe burning of people’s eyes and lungs and their skin was being scorched from the effects of the chemicals. Then, all of a sudden, as soon as the gas hit, the state troopers up on top of the roof started firing guns and for the next ten minutes they let out damn near 15,000 rounds of bullets. All you could see was tracer bullets.
Every 5th bullet was a red tracer bullet that was flying through the air and you would see what looked just like fire spurting out all over the place and you could hear the screams of people just being shot and murdered in cold blood and people just begging man for their lives while they were being shot to death. And so while the troopers on the roof top were still blasting away, the troops in the buildings came storming through.
There were a number of movies that were made about it later that showed roughly what was happening. There was one that was made recently starring Samuel L. Jackson called Against the Wall and another movie with Morgan Freeman playing the lead role called Attica. When I saw the movie I sort of relived it in my head you know. The day that they came in and did this massacre.
RAD: Where were you when all the shooting was going on?
StS: I was up on top of the catwalk. When I got up after the canister hit and took the cloth off my face there were two state troopers that had come over to where I was and this one trooper put a shotgun in my face and he pulled the trigger and the clip fell out of the gun!
Now both him and the other state trooper had gas masks on and when the other trooper saw that the clip fell out, I could see it in his eyes he was thinking, wow that’s not supposed to happen, right?
Then he took the butt of his gun and smashed me across the face and the other cop grabbed me and they threw me over the catwalk and down on to a handball court which was about 40 feet below. The only thing that stopped me from getting killed was this fire hose that we had tied up along side the road and I was able to grab it and break the majority of the fall going down.
But I still busted my leg when I hit the concrete. My head hit as well and I went unconscious. But as I was going down I must have been shot at least three times with pellets of Double O Buck because later I had three pieces of lead buckshot in me, two in one leg and one in the other plus some kind of graze in the top of my head.
So, like I said, I went unconscious for awhile and then when I came to it was almost like my spirit had went outside my body and I could see the murders being committed and at the same time I could see everything happening; the killing and the screaming and the horror and the horrific screaming that was going on. And then all of a sudden I came back into my body and this guard came up and put a gun to me and said, “Crawl nigger crawl.” They called everybody a nigger that day.
What they did then was they started throwing people into ditches that had been used as urinals or places to defecate and just assassinated them at gunpoint. Then after the initial assault they would just go around and randomly pick people out and execute them. They’d put X’s on their backs and mark them for execution.
And so anyways, that day New York state murdered 43 people including 11 of their own and then they tried to justify their actions by saying that the inmates had cut the guards’ throats and castrated them and beheaded them. But in reality a forensic expert in Rochester, NY said that nobody was castrated or none of them had died by inmates knives but had all died as a result of gunfire.
So there was an example of where the press had reported misinformation and subsequently they had to retract all of it. Forty-three people died that day and over 80 people were wounded and maimed for life.
On the same morning by the way, it’s really strange, because native people that were at the Longhouse in Onondaga said that there were these drums hanging on the Longhouse wall and when the massacre was taking place these drums began to play by themselves. They were playing a warrior’s song and it was like the spirit was playing this song for those at Attica who had lost their lives. It was very powerful and when the people saw these drums playing this Warrior song by themselves in honour of those who had died everybody felt that the people who were at Attica gave their lives so that the Mohawk Nation and the Onondaga people would live. So there was great honour there. There was great thanks.
In any event, after being moved around through 16 different prisons, a year later they had indicted 61 of us. We became known as the Attica Brothers, the supposed ringleaders who had started the riot at Attica prison in 1971.
My trial was an international trial heard around the world. It was reported by national and international news. I was on bail for 19 months and during that time I went up and was involved in the resistance takeover in Ganienkeh in 1974 in Mohawk territory in upstate New York.
So anyway, like I was saying, my trial was a pretty celebrated case. William Kunzler was my attorney and my co-defendant was a guy by the name of Charlie Joe Ternasalice and he had Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General, as his lawyer. And then four years later I fired Kunzler as my lawyer because he refused to expedite my appeal after I got convicted and after I let him go I also got Ramsey Clark to come on as my attorney and he got me out after six months.
When I did go to trial and was convicted I was facing the electric chair but they ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1973 and so my conviction was dropped down to 20 years to life and Time magazine had said that unlike most murder cases the case of John Hill’s was unique in that it was totally bereft of evidence.
Basically they had put up a fabricated incident saying that they’d seen me swinging a club and hitting this guy over the head which, of course, was bullshit. It really was. If anything happened it was the gate falling down on him and he was killed in the melee. There were 500 people running up and down through that hall when it happened.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> In any event the long and the short of it is that I got 20 years to life and I went back into prison. And while this was going on Rockefeller was vying for Vice-President under Gerald Ford and he was acting Vice-President and waiting for Senate confirmation. And as he was waiting for Senate confirmation his political record was so blemished by Attica that he tried not to make the state look so bad for what they’d done in the massacre.
So what he did was Rockefeller basically did jury tampering with the head of the jury of criminal investigation of New York state with a guy by the name of Anthony B. Simonetti and he had told Simonetti that he wanted him to suppress all evidence of any murders that were committed and were being presented to a second Grand Jury that was hearing the murders that were committed by the state troopers, that is, the executions that were committed after the initial assault.
There was a guy by the name of Malcolm Bell who was working as part of that Attica prosecutorial staff and Malcolm Bell said he refused to be a part of this jury tampering. And he wrote a whole statement about it and submitted it to the New York Times and the New York Times knew about it before I even got convicted by the jury and they said that they would not release that statement about their knowledge about Rockefeller trying to tampered with the second Grand Jury hearings through this bureau of criminal investigation until after my trial was over. And only then did they run that piece and broke the story in the New York Times about a month afterward I was in jail.
Well, that created a big scandal. The succeeding Governor was Hugh Carrie and his Lieutenant Governor was Mario Como and what they basically did was they commissioned a former judge by the name of Bernard Shaw to investigate the allegations and so all the rest of the Attica Brothers’ trials were put on hold for the next two years while this commission went about its work.
Eventually it made a recommendation to Governor Hugh Carrie that the books on Attica should be closed and they also recommended that the New York state troopers be given a blanket amnesty. Remember, they wouldn’t give us a blanket amnesty during Attica but now they were giving the New York state troopers a blanket amnesty from any prosecution. They dismissed all the pending indictments against the rest of the sixty Attica Brothers and in my case they granted me Executive Clemency.
That made me eligible to go to the parole board and on the strength of the Governor’s recommendation I should have been released on parole. I finally went to the parole board after seven attempts by these bastards to kill me in prison including one when they were moving me from Greenhaven State Prison into a halfway house to go to a parole board hearing. There was a car full of cops with guns trying to shoot at the two detectives that were driving me from that prison into New York. If it hadn’t been for those detectives driving down a back road at speeds of up to 120 mph and kicking up all that dust we would have been dead.
I went to this parole hearing and for the first time in the history of New York state, on the strength of a Governor’s recommendation for Executive Clemency, I was given two more years because a state Senator by the name of Dale Vocker and Ralph Marino threatened the acting Chairman of the New York state parole board (who was facing confirmation hearings for a $46,000 job); threatened that he would be denied that confirmation (the first black head commissioner of the New York state parole board) if John Hill was to be released on parole. Subsequently I was given two more years, the only man convicted in the Attica Rebellion/Massacre of 1971.
Then two years later, after being #1 of a hundred political prisoners listed by Andrew Young, Ambassador to the United Nations, in denial of what his own boss Jimmy Carter had said, that there were no political prisoners in the United States, I was finally let go based on the fact that I was the only one convicted and that there was no way that they could really hold me after dropping all the indictments against everyone else.
But if it hadn’t been for Rockefeller trying to cover up and jury tamper I would probably have died in prison because of police vendettas. I finally got out in 1979.
(End of Part 1)
Labels: Activist, Bush, Canada, crimes against humanity, Native Americans
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