[Pnews] The Pendleton 2 saved a man’s life. A judge sentenced them to 200 years for it.

[Prisoner News]

therealnews.com
<https://therealnews.com/the-pendleton-2-saved-a-mans-life-a-judge-sentenced-them-to-200-years-for-it>
The Pendleton 2 saved a man’s life. A judge sentenced them to 200 years for
it.
Mansa Musa - April 3, 2023
------------------------------

[image: YouTube video]

On February 1, 1985, prison guards at the Indiana State Reformatory (now
Pendleton Correctional Facility) affiliated with a KKK-splinter group known
as the Sons of Light chained prisoner Lincoln Love in their office and
began to mercilessly beat him. John “Balagoon” Cole and Christopher “Naeem”
Trotter led a group of prisoners to the office and demanded entrance. When
the Sons of Light responded with more violence, the prisoners took hostages
and occupied a cell block for 15 hours, releasing a list of demands to
improve inhumane prison conditions. John “Balagoon” Cole and Christopher
“Naeem” Trotter were ultimately sentenced to 84 and 142 years for their
successful attempt to save Lincoln Love’s life. Cole and Trotter remain
incarcerated to this day, and now face major medical complications from old
age and decades of institutional neglect.

Click here to learn more about the campaign to free the Pendleton 2 and how
you can get involved <https://pendleton2.com/>.

Too Black is a poet, member of Black Alliance For Peace
<https://blackallianceforpeace.com/>, host of The Black Myths Podcast
<https://blackmyths.libsyn.com/> on Black Power Media
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC6o7j4ZNNziKnCyds8-XzA>, and producer of The
Last Dope Intellectual <https://thelastdopeintellectual.libsyn.com/>. Too
Black is the communications director for the Defense Committee to Free the
Pendleton 2. He is also the co-director, co-producer, and editor of the
documentary *The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ6c4iE88Uk>*. Too Black is based in
Indianapolis, IN and can be reached at tooblack8808 at gmail.com or @too_black_
<https://twitter.com/too_black_> on Twitter.

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of
incarceration, gender and resistance. She’s the author of *“Prisons Make Us
Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration
<http://www.beacon.org/Prisons-Make-Us-Safer-P1642.aspx>* (2021) and the
coauthor of *Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular
Reforms <https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name>* (2020).

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

------------------------------
Transcript

*Mansa Musa:  *Welcome to this edition of *Rattling the Bars*. I’m Mansa
Musa. Imagine, if you will, you had three years left before you was
released from prison, or two months left before you released from prison,
and this happened:

*Speaker 1:  *This third time they came down there in a matter of hours,
they riot gear, you know, and this and that. Now, they lined up outside
Lokmar’s cell. Now keep in mind, you done passed up four or five more
cells, but you had no Lokmar’s cell. We in the middle. You got some more
cells before you get to us. Why you lined up outside that brother’s cell?
As I seen them going to Lokmar’s cell, he didn’t see what I seen on the
side of the wall. There was some more guards lined up, sticks, shields,
helmets, you know, ready to do battle. They lined up, man. They got, looked
like guns and all type of stuff.

They went in on the brother. Had him subdued, had him handcuffed. And what
really caused this riot this particular day, once he was handcuffed, one of
the guards took the sticks and hit him in his head. Blood gushed out of his
head. I’m right there. I got tears in my eyes. I tell them, look, give some
of that, just to take them off of him. So one of the guards say, don’t
worry about it, y’all got some of that coming. You know what I mean?
[inaudible] So I look over there, there’s more blood gushing out of the
brother’s head. He’s cuffed behind his back.

*Speaker 2:  *They beat him damn near to a pulp with a solid oak club. Once
they beat him, they drug him out of his cell. And then drug him down the
range of the tier. [inaudible] of the range for all the other prisoners to
see. And everybody thought he was dead. They thought he was dead.

*Speaker 1:  *Hey man, somebody going tell. Hey man, they trying to kill us
down here. Once John Cole got the word of what’s taking place, somewhere
down that line, him and his brother named Christopher Trotter met up. So
now they coming, trying to see what’s going on in this particular unit.

*Mansa Musa:  *Today, I have two people that are instrumental in helping to
bring to light and reverse this injustice that’s taking place against the
Pendleton 2. And when I say injustice, that’s an understatement. Here we
are in 2023 and we have in the United States of America a prison system and
a prison-industrial complex in this country that operates racially with
impunity, that they don’t have no restraints, have no oversight, and
continuously operate in this fashion, in a gang mentality. Welcome to *Rattling
the Bars*.

And Ms. Law, introduce yourself to the *Rattling the Bars* audience and
tell us a little bit about yourself.

*Victoria Law:  *Hey, thank you so much for having both of us and for
covering this. My name is Victoria Law. I am an author and a freelance
journalist that covers issues of incarceration, specifically resistance and
organizing happening both behind the bars and outside to bring people home
and to shrink the giant prison system that the nation has become.

*Mansa Musa:  *All right. And Too Black, introduce yourself to the *Rattling
the Bars* audience and tell us a little bit about yourself.

*Too Black:  *Yeah, my name is Too Black, I am a poet, and relevant to this
conversation, I am the comms director, comms representative for the Defense
Committee to Free the Pendleton 2. And I am the producer and editor of the
film you just saw, the clip from the film you just saw, excuse me, *The
Pendleton 2: They Stood Up*. So thanks for having me. And I also want to
send my kind regards to Eddie Conway. I’ve watched his show throughout the
years and I know about his story. So just rest in peace, Eddie Conway, as
well.

*Mansa Musa:  *All right. And we appreciate that. And let’s just get right
into the heart of the matter. And I’m going to set the table up and then
y’all start dishing out the dishes as y’all feel free.

All right, so we have two individuals that are locked up in the Indiana
State Prison. And Indiana State Prison has, basically, the guards are
basically a part of a hybrid group of the Ku Klux Klan, all Ku Klux Klan,
All American Nazis, skinheads, all things racist, all things anti-humanity.
And in this regard, they operate within the prison system with impunity. At
some point, they got to the point where these guards got in a state of mind
where it was all out assault on prisoners this particular day. Pick up from
there.

*Victoria Law:  *So this had been a longstanding occurrence. It wasn’t just
that on this particular day, the guards at what is now the Pendleton
Correctional Facility decided that they were going to brutalize
incarcerated people. This had long been an issue where guards were allowed
to brutalize people, to place them in solitary confinement – Which is
itself a form of brutalization and violence. They were allowed to what they
call “burn” people for meals, for other things, so that they would just not
give them what they were supposed to be giving them, such as food. And on
Feb. 1, 1985 – And men at the prison had said that there was constantly
this tension and this threat of violence from guards. This was not a
surprising occurrence.

On Feb. 1 that day, the guards had placed men in solitary confinement,
including a jailhouse lawyer named Lincoln Love, who was very highly
regarded by men in the prison. And he was in solitary confinement. And he
was being subjected to what they call a cell search, which many of your
viewers know is when guards come en masse to a person’s cell and say that
they’re going to search the cell. And that means not just rifling through a
person’s belongings, but violently tearing through everything that they own.

*Mansa Musa:  *That’s right.

*Victoria Law:  *This could mean that their loved one’s pictures get thrown
in the toilet, they get stomped on, their legal work gets ripped up, and
the person themself is unable to do anything about this.

And on that day, they came to the cell, said that they were going to do a
cell search. The man who was directly across the corridor from Lincoln Love
said that usually cell searches happen in an orderly fashion. You go to the
first cell, the second cell, the third cell.

*Mansa Musa:  *Right, right.

*Victoria Law:  *This time they came directly to Lincoln Love’s cell. And
Lincoln Love was supposedly not quick enough to comply, so he didn’t
immediately get up and run to the back of the cell to comply with this cell
search. Instead he said something like, you already searched me. Why are
you doing this again? And this, to the guards, was their justification for
going in and beating him, handcuffing him, and then brutalizing him some
more. So he was unable to fight back. He was on the ground, the man locked
in the cell across from him tried to divert the guard by yelling at them
and hoping that they would turn away from Lincoln Love and not kill him, to
turn their anger and their fury and their violence against him. So he, in
that moment, did what he could to save Lincoln Love’s life. And other men
yelled out the window to men who were on the yard that the guards were
beating Lincoln Love and they were going to kill him.

And men, including the two men we were talking about, Christopher Naeem
Trotter and John Balagoon Cole, attempted to go to the administration to
have them stop the officers’ beatings. And there they were met by armed
guards who refused to let them pass and attempted to beat them. And then
they went to a housing unit to get in to escape these guards, and they
ended up taking over the housing unit and taking several staff members
hostage. And they issued a series of demands, because at that point they
said that if they had not done so, it would have been a massacre. Too Black
calls this the Attica of Indiana. It is [inaudible] in the prison system.

And after 17 hours, the prison finally relented, people inside the prison
called media on the outside, including an all-Black radio station, which
then reached out to other media. So there was media coverage. So the prison
was not able to do what they did at Attica here in New York state, just go
in, start shooting randomly and killing people. But instead, after 17 hours
the state said, okay, we will acquiesce to these demands. The media
accompanied the men to the cells in the solitary confinement unit, meaning
that the guards could not then immediately brutalize them. But the
following day, they were all transferred. And Chris Trotter and John Cole
were brought up on outside charges of attempted murder, rioting, assault,
and confinement, which is another word for kidnapping. And they were
sentenced to 84 years for John Cole, who had three and a half years left on
his sentence. And for Chris Trotter, who had three months left before he
went home, he got 142 years in prison.

*Mansa Musa:  *Okay. Now, let’s start right there. In terms of the amount
of time they got, but more importantly, when I read the article, I read in
there where prior to this, they had filed lawsuits and civil rights suits
about the conditions and about the brutality. And from your knowledge – And
I’ll get to you in a minute, Too Black – From your knowledge, have the
state legislators, have the federal government taken any notice of what was
going on? ‘Cause this had been going on for a while. This ain’t just
happen, like you say, this ain’t just happened that day. This was like,
well, this is a good day to be somebody day. That’s what that amounted to.
Wasn’t like it’s not a good day, it’s just like, okay, today we can do it
with impunity, or whatever the reason behind the lack of restraint. Talk
about that. Who doing oversight outside of the organization? What
government agencies, or if any?

*Victoria Law:  *Well, the state Department of Correction operates under
the auspices of the state, so the governor has oversight. He has the
ability to appoint or remove the director of the prison system. A few years
later, there was a report made to the governor’s office about a white
supremacist organization called the Brotherhood in the Indiana State Farm,
which is now called Putnamville Correctional Facility. And the governor did
nothing. There had been outside investigators and state investigators who
had investigated this Brotherhood and had not been able to do anything.

These people operated with such impunity that when an investigator dared to
file a report stating that a member of the Brotherhood, a guard associated
with a white supremacist organization beat up a prisoner or beat up an
incarcerated man and then falsified documents about the beating, the guard
and his buddies went to the local bar and beat up the investigator. I mean,
this is the kind of impunity. They are not just targeting the people
inside, but they also feel free to run amok on the outside, going around to
outside bars and beating people up when they’re having a drink or
celebrating their birthday with their family members.

So you can see that there is a deeper problem than just people who feel
that they have so much power over incarcerated men that they can do this.
But that ripples out into people feeling that they have the impunity to
brutalize and violate incarcerated people and anyone who tries to hold them
to accountability.

*Mansa Musa:  *Thank you.

Too Black, talk about where we at in terms of the defense. And before you
get there, I just want to make this observation that when we find ourselves
in these situations – And this is in defense of the actions and the
behavior on the part of the individuals that was charged – When we find
ourselves in these situations where we are incarcerated and we find
ourselves where the guards are brutalizing us, and from a prison mentality,
we don’t have no choice but to defend ourselves. And from the prison
mentality, we take whatever necessary measures to defend ourselves. We
don’t kowtow, mainly when you know that they coming with blackjacks,
plastic bullets, mace that take your breath, that you don’t have no choice,
you going to die. So it’s better dying fighting than laying on the ground
and getting beat half to death.

So I’m saying that to say that, for our viewers, if you look at what’s
happening and you feel like that they did something to deserve this, this
wasn’t something that they brought on themselves, this is the environment
they in. They have a racist police guard union, that this is what they do.
Too Black, talk about the defense and where we at with the defense for the
two brothers.

*Too Black:  *Well currently, they’ve been in prison for just this case for
37 years, and they haven’t exhausted, but they’ve went through several
appeals trying to get sentence modifications, PCRs, et cetera. Some of the
most recent stuff – ‘Cause again, we could be here all day going through
the different challenges they’ve made. In 2018, Christopher Naeem Trotter,
that’s the prisoner who received 142 years, he had his sentence vacated.
And again, this is in Madison County, Indiana. Anderson’s the main city,
but this is where Pendleton Prison is, originally where the uprising took
place. So he had his sentence vacated towards the end, I believe, in
October of 2018.

For those who don’t know what vacated means, basically the sentence that he
had was removed and he needed to be re-sentenced because they deemed that
he had ineffective counsel on his original case. So that means he could
have been released. The years could have been reduced dramatically to a few
years left. The judge had the freedom, really, to do whatever they wanted
to do.

But the judge who actually vacated the sentence was removed from the bench,
that was Judge Dudley. Then they brought Judge Carroll in. So towards the
end of 2019, his sentence was vacated, and he was just re-sentenced to 122
years from 142. So effectively nothing happened. They just re-sentenced him
to life in prison. It was a sham at that point. And the judge says, I can’t
remember the direct quote, so I’m paraphrasing, but something to the
effect, he says, we have to have our brothers back. And that was quoted in
the Anderson *Herald Bulletin*. So it was obvious from our standpoint that
this is deeper, this is why we call them political prisoners, ’cause this
is deeper than whatever so-called crime that would’ve committed.

*Mansa Musa:  *And talk about, you made the good observation of, you
juxtaposed this Indiana concentration camp plantation with the Attica
plantation. Talk about that. And be mindful if you could make a connection
between the little small county, because in the *Attica* documentary that
was done, was remarkably done. The producer talked to some of the people in
the Attica community and the woman said, Attica is the major industry in
Attica. She was saying the prison-industrial complex, the plantation
Attica, was the number one source of income for the population of the
people of Attica. From your observation and your insight or study, do you
see the comparison in that regard?

*Too Black:  *Maybe not so much in the employment aspect. There is not a
major city, but there’s a city in the county of Madison. But there did seem
to be a pipeline from Ellwood, Indiana. Ellwood, Indiana is, again,
stationed within Madison County. And a lot of people from Ellwood, Indiana,
particularly at the time in which this happened, worked at the Pendleton
Correctional Facility, even though that’s actually across the county. And
Ellwood, Indiana is actually a known hub for the Ku Klux Klan. We actually
have pictures in the film that were Klansmen, were taking pictures in
Ellwood, Indiana.

So there was always a relationship there. And then a lot of the people who
were on the jury were from Ellwood, Indiana. And also, it’s important to
know that the jury was all white, even though the county at the time was
about 40% Black. So most people on the jury from Ellwood, Indiana, and many
of the people that worked in Pendleton were from Ellwood, Indiana. So
there’s a pipeline of white supremacist activity just in that nature. So I
think it becomes culturally where the people, they know that’s their next
job ’cause they have family there, they have friends there, and they just
hire them on from there. So it doesn’t matter what the other industries are.

I think it’s similar to these people, it’s similar to the way we understand
maybe factory jobs, where if you have a friend or a family member, they
could bring you through the pipeline. So in the Indiana Department of
Corrections, you have people even at the time who were there for 20, 30
years, and then these people move up in the ranks of the Indiana Department
of Corrections. And it’s also important to note, even the folks who were in
this KKK splinter group that were part of the Sons of Light – That’s the
name of the group who ran the prison when this occurred – These weren’t
just low-level guards. You’re talking about lieutenants, talking about
captains, talking about sergeants. You’re talking about people throughout
the ranks of the prison.

So sometimes, when people think about this they just think about some poor
white people who do this ’cause they’re bored. And it’s like, no, this is
systemic throughout being in the Department of Correction. And as was noted
earlier, this wasn’t just in the Pendleton facility. And I think someone
brought up earlier that there was action taken prior. Yeah, there was a
class action lawsuit that was taken against this prison because even some
of the guards who worked there, regardless of their beliefs individually,
felt unsafe because they treated the prisoners so terribly that they knew
that eventually something was going to happen.

It didn’t just end there. There was actually another uprising just the
following year at Pendleton Correctional Facility, at the time it was
Indiana Reformatory. So yeah, this is just the nature of how it works, and
Indiana likes to act like these things don’t happen or these are isolated
incidents. And this story has been swept under the rug for roughly 40 years
now.

*Mansa Musa:  *And in terms of when you made the comparison to Attica,
because I know in Attica, before the Attica uprising, one, the industry was
like slave labor. I think you was getting a penny a day or something to
that effect. Two, the housing was oppressive and dehumanizing. You was
cramped in small cells. The shower situation was dehumanizing. And the food
was something that you wouldn’t even put in a pig trough, that ultimately
led Attica to critical mass where you had the rebellion.

But talk about the conditions at Pendleton, if you can, about what kind of
prison is it? A lot of the prisons, after the crime bill, they started
modernizing in terms of electronics. Everything was controlled, all
movement was controlled. Cameras everywhere. I was in supermax in Maryland.
So describe these particular prisons or the prisons in Indiana for our
audience to get an understanding of how they are?

*Too Black:  *Yeah, well, like you said, similar to Attica – And again, I
also want to say that I don’t just call this the Attica of Indiana, this is
what the people inside say, I’m just conveying what they say. So that’s how
it’s understood. It’s actually pretty well known inside regardless of what
we know – But when they took over the prison after the uprising, they had
14 demands, and many of those demands were addressing the actual conditions
of the prison, because they were asking for better food, they were asking
for cleaning supplies and things that they needed, ’cause even part of this
started because they couldn’t get cleaning supplies. They couldn’t get the
basic needs that they had. So as you know, when that doesn’t happen, often
ruckus will occur because young people can’t get these things.

So this wasn’t a sanitary place, as well as the treatment that they were
going through. This was a place where it was, like you said, it was old and
people were getting sick. So that was definitely the nature of it. That’s
why part of their demands were to ask for those things. And you go through
all 14 of their demands, they didn’t have any wild demands about, they
wanted a helicopter to fly away.

*Mansa Musa:  *Right. They just wanted to be treated like human beings.

*Too Black:  *Exactly, exactly. Everything was addressing the situation
that they were in. They weren’t asking for a hotel, they were just asking
that while they’re there, for whatever that’s worth –

*Mansa Musa:  *Basic human rights.

*Too Black:  *[Crosstalk] yeah, some dignity, and they weren’t receiving
that. So yeah, it was coming from multiple angles. It’s the treatment of
the guards, it’s the state of the prison. Even some of the charges people
were getting for petty stuff that made them have to stay there even longer.
Even with Christopher Naeem Trotter, for instance, he had a petty theft,
and he shouldn’t even have been in that prison. He was there technically
because he had a military background so they put him in one of these
maximum level security prisons, when based on his actual charge, he
shouldn’t even have been there. So yeah, you have people who were assigned
there, obviously, just because of racism, because of the way that they were
treated even prior to getting in prison. So there was all these conditions
that definitely led to the day we’re discussing.

*Mansa Musa:  *Hey, Victoria, tell our audience what is the next step as
far as from your perspective in terms of trying to get some justice for the
Pendleton 2?

*Victoria Law:  *Well, I think that one of the things we’ve seen in
Indiana, and Too Black can correct me if I am mistaken, is that we’ve seen
that the courts are not willing to stand up when incarcerated people assert
their right to self-defense. And one of the striking things when I
interviewed both Christopher Naeem Trotter and John Balagoon Cole, is that
they said that they didn’t want this story just to be narrowly about them.
Yes, they want their freedom, they want this injustice to be abolished, but
they also said what happens to us happens to people in prisons around the
state and the country. So it is not just about them, but how do they use
this story to ensure that other people who maybe don’t have the same
platforms or the same access to folks on the outside, like in Indiana,
there’s IDOC Watch, Indiana Department of Correction Watch, but that
perhaps are in states that don’t have that kind of outside, totally
independent oversight that can take action? How to leverage that so that
these injustices don’t keep occurring and occurring and occurring, so that
Too Black and I are not here three years from now talking [crosstalk].

*Mansa Musa:  *Right, exactly.

*Victoria Law:  *So I think that’s important to note, that we can’t look at
this as an isolated incident. We can’t look to the same legal system that
sentenced people to 142 years and 84 years for an incident in which nobody
was killed. And even one of the guards who had been injured during the
uprising filed a suit not against Cole and Trotter, but against the state
to say you created these conditions in which I and my fellow guards got
hurt because you allowed people to go around, you allowed staff members to
go around brutalizing people in custody and that then finally blew up into
an incident in which I and other people, who are supposedly not the bad
apples, ended up being hurt.

*Mansa Musa:  *And Too Black, as briefly as you can, tell our audience,
one, how they can get in touch with you, and how they can support your
effort to get these men justice.

*Too Black:  *Yeah, well we have a website that will be debuting on
Thursday, just Pendleton 2, Pendleton and then the number 2.com [
pendleton2.com]. If you want to reach us, you can also reach us at the
Pendleton 2, again, the number 2, at Gmail [thependleton2 at gmail.com]. We’re
going to be releasing a film on BreakThrough News this Thursday, the *Pendleton
2: They Stood Up*. And that film documents many of the things that we
talked about today, and it also chronicles their time in solitary
confinement. We just recently added that addition to the film. So if you
want to check that out, definitely do that. That’ll be debuting at 7:00 PM
Eastern Time this Thursday, March 30 on BreakThrough News.

And if you’d like to book a screening of the film, if you want to sign the
petitions or if you want to donate, you can do it at the website, but we
definitely encourage that, particularly the screenings of the film. You can
have those in your local community and we can Zoom in, show up with
something of that nature and we can help talk about this further.

*Mansa Musa:  *Yeah, and thank you. Thank you very much, Victoria Law and
Too Black. We want to encourage our viewers to check out the *Rattling the
Bars*, all information that’s going to come out on this and review some of
the activities going around the Pendleton 2.

There you have it, the real news about the Pendleton 2, two brothers that
for no more reason than to want to be human beings and treated like human
beings have been given astronomical sentences, astronomical time, and
brutalized in the process. And we want to encourage everyone to look at
this and evaluate it and let your conscience be your guide in terms of what
you think you should do. Thank you, Victoria, and thank you, Too Black.

And we ask that you continue to support The Real News and *Rattling the
Bars*. It’s our aspirations that you support this mechanism to the extent
that it become your primary news source, because we are actually the real
news. You’re not going to get nothing about the Pendleton 2 on major media.
You’re not going to have an author like Too Black, or you’re not going to
have an author like Victoria Law telling the real news about events that’s
taking place in real people’s lives. All right, there you have, The Real
News. Thank you very much.

*Maximillian Alvarez:  *Thank you so much for watching The Real News
Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care
about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap
your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity
Forever.
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