Word: oswald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Having been inside Sing Sing and other penal institutions (as an inspecting grand juror), I advise deliberation in assessing the Attica riot. Commissioner of Correction Russell Oswald made the only possible rational decision. He was facing primitive hysteria, obviously inflamed by subversives. He gave the same order that any field commander facing a public enemy in battle would have given...
...townsfolk insist that the prison guards treated their charges with fair discipline and genuinely tried to help them. The residents feel strongly that the riot occurred because of the "permissiveness" of state officials?notably Oswald, who is as heartily detested as the inmates. "Oswald was at fault," said Frank Mandeville, for many years the owner of Timm's Hardware. "If he had gone in right away, some lives might have been lost, but not on the tragic scale we have now." Mandeville, who still doubts that the hostages were killed by police bullets rather than knife wounds, insists: "Political pressure...
When the compound was secured an hour later, nine hostages lay dead. Also dead or fatally wounded were 26 prisoners (four convicts were later found dead of stab wounds, apparently inflicted by other inmates in factional fighting). Then, in the confusion of the aftermath, Oswald and Dunbar made a perhaps understandable but nonetheless inexcusable mistake. They announced that the hostages had all died by having their throats slit. Dunbar added that two hostages had been killed before the attack, and that one hostage had been found emasculated, his testicles stuffed in his mouth...
...state's credibility was not bolstered by the bumbling response that officials made to Dr. Edland's finding. At first they denied the medical examiner's report; then Oswald wearily admitted that the throat-slashing reports were erroneous. Other spokesmen tried to suggest that the deaths were really the prisoners' fault, claiming homemade zip guns had been found in the compound. Rockefeller finally said flatly that the hostages "had died in the crossfire." He insisted, though, that the attack was "morally justified" and that there had been no "indiscriminate shooting...
...almost all states, inmates have few legal rights to freedom of speech and assembly. One of the 28 concessions that Commissioner Russell G. Oswald offered to the Attica rebels was that convicts would be covered by minimum-wage laws for their work. Yet courts have consistently ruled that prisoners have no right at all to wages. Nor are they entitled to compensation for injuries on the job. "Prisons have been such a garbage can of society," says Buffalo Law Professor Herman Schwartz, "that they have been a garbage can of law as well...