Word: atticas
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FOUR AND A HALF years ago, on September 13, 1971, state police surrounding D-Yard of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York let loose a barrage of indiscriminate gunfire that six minutes later, when it stopped, left 29 inmates and 10 correctional officers dead and 81 others wounded. The New York State Special Commission on Attica, the McKay Commission, called this event "the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, with the exception of the Indian massacres in the late nineteenth century." Since then, the Attica massacre investigations have led to ten convictions of inmates...
...news last week of the end of the Attica investigation comes as a grim reminder that brutality and repression need not occur halfway around the world for government officials to hide their consequences and that even when uncovered, indiscriminate governmental violence can go unpunished...
...took three separate investigations--the McKay Commission, the prosecution and the Meyer Report released last December--before the state of New York would finally admit that the inquiry into the Attica massacre was biased, that the prosecution was "one-sided" in taking out 42 indictments on 62 inmates for 1289 alleged crimes and only one indictment on a state trooper. It took almost four and a half years for the truth to emerge: that, according to the Meyer report, state troopers committed "criminal acts of brutality to inmates," that troopers and corrections officers failed to act as courageously and legally...
...Attica massacre and the subsequent attempts to cover it up are not the fault solely of the state troopers and corrections officers involved. A large part of the responsibility for Attica lies with the man who ordered the police into the prison to begin with--Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Even the McKay Commission concluded that Rockefeller "should not have committed the state's armed forces against the rebels without first appearing on the scene and satisfying himself that there was no other alternative and that all precautions against excessive force had been taken." Rockefeller never visited Attica to deal with...
...Democrat in his or her right political mind could afford to speak out continually for the truly forgotten people. Nelson Rockefeller was vilified for not paying taxes like the rest of us, but not even Fred Harris talked about conditions at Attica. Only Birch Bayh and Sargent Shriver talked straightforwardly and consistently about helping black people, and between them they garnered 12.9 per cent of the vote...