Keith LaMar, on death row Oct. 18, in a photo taken by an officer at the Ohio State Penitentiary.
Keith LaMar, incarcerated on death row since 1995, hasn’t seen the sky in six months. Every day he is allowed to go out onto a not very large terrace, covered with concrete on all four sides and with holes in the roof through which all the fresh air to which he is entitled enters. Rain or shine, the guards at Ohio State Penitentiary sometimes take a while to remember to come back to pick you up. Last time, he doesn’t know why, he asked to go out six days in a row. Sometimes you blame yourself for not doing it more often.
LaMar has been in one of America’s most feared maximum security prisons for 25 years. He is serving his sentence in extraordinary solitary confinement as additional punishment for a crime he supposedly did not commit: his involvement in the murder of five inmates in the opening hours of the 11-day Lucasville prison riot, the longest in American history. In 1998 he was transferred to this then newly built prison. He spends 22 hours a day in a windowless cell measuring 5.5 square meters; The rest of the time they move him to a larger room where he runs around, goes up and down stairs, and does push-ups and pull-ups. He doesn’t share this time with anyone either.
This makes it possible to make phone calls eight hours a day and, for several months now, to send text messages. Also receive visits. In mid-October, he accepted the EL PAÍS interview for a four-hour interview in one of those cinema booths separated by bulletproof glass. This Wednesday the remaining rooms were empty.
He arrived accompanied by two officers, with handcuffs on his hands, which they removed, and shackles on his feet. At 54, he is a tall man, 6 feet 3 inches tall, and he stays in shape. On the way there and back, the guards subject him to a humiliating physical examination. “These guys are always trying to break you, to take away your dignity,” he said after a while.
He wore a thick sweatshirt and a long-sleeved T-shirt under the blue prison uniform shirt. He justified himself by saying that it could get extremely cold in these huts, which was later confirmed. Visitors are forced to leave their jackets outside; You are only allowed to enter with an ID and a credit card that you can use to spend money in the expensive junk food machines, so that the big business of mass incarceration in the United States (which moves $180,000 million a year) does not decline. Due to these strict rules, the conversation could not be recorded and notes had to be taken on a piece of paper and with a pen borrowed from one of the two prison guards on duty, who ironically passed the time by watching the channel on television to view .exams. The interview was completed by telephone last Friday. Ohio also bans photographers from death row, although an officer is allowed to take a photo at the end of the encounter with an old digital camera.
On the day of the visit, Ohio was still a little less than a month away from the date on which he had scheduled his execution, November 16th. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine granted him a reprieve in July until January 2027. LaMar calls it his “borrowed time.” “We’re being pushed into the abyss in here, but I’m not ready to die,” he said in the interview, in which he delivered an articulate speech peppered with references to black thinkers, activists and poets, from Primo Levi to Malcolm X .
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The extension is not an act of grace (or not only). For five years, Ohio, one of 27 states that imposes the death penalty, has not killed any of its 130 death row prisoners because drug companies refuse to sell lethal injection drugs to authorities. LaMar recently received an official letter asking him to choose his alternative: electric chair, hanging, firing squad, guillotine or gas chamber. When we asked him in our conversation whether he had answered this letter and, if so, what he would prefer, he replied: “I don’t want to take part in this macabre game. “I would prefer to die in my sleep, or better yet, in bed with a woman.”
Pianist Albert Marquès (left) at a Freedom First concert at the Black Music Festival in Girona last January. He is accompanied from left by Manel Fortià, Erin Corina and Marc Ayza. An image of Keith LaMar reciting from death row is projected onto the screen.
To celebrate the “triumph of survival”, on the day Ohio tried to murder him, the prisoner will release a song with the Catalan jazz pianist Albert Marquès, a song called “The Journey”, which features some of the best improvisers The York scene was recorded in modern times. The lyrics tell the story of how the 37-year-old musician and the inmate began collaborating on a project called “Freedom First” during the pandemic, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, with LaMar singing lyrics from the hallway of death over the phone performs that fit the tonalities of contemporary jazz. Most of the lyrics are his own (memories of his life before and after prison or cries of protest against the death penalty), and there is a song in which he recites the poem “On Life” by the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, his favorite poem begins like this : “Life has no jokes / You have to live with all seriousness.”
Last year they recorded an album that they performed live on dozens of stages on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, Marquès has just published a book entitled “Jazz Sounds on Death Row (Criticism)”, in which he tells of the relationship that was forged between the two through music. It is an original essay, a mixture of LaMar’s biography, the pianist’s personal memories and an x-ray of the American prison system from the perspective of a foreigner married to an American and father of two children in a country that is: often brutal and not always easy to understand.
When they knock, the prisoner enters his cell; He crouches between the toilet and the wall, “where there is better protection,” closes his eyes and tries to keep up. “It’s not easy because all I get is a confusing noise.” confess. The French embassy in Washington scheduled the performance for October 10, an evening against the death penalty where the public could see the difficulties in staging it. A woman’s metallic voice announced, “This call is coming from a correctional facility in Ohio and may be recorded and monitored.” After some time, the connection was lost. LaMar dialed again from the prison and Marquès, still knocking, picked up the phone.
Keith LaMar and Albert Marquès during a prison visit in Ohio in June 2021.
The pianist, who has lived in New York for a decade and described himself as an “activist” days later in a video conference at the Manhattan school where he teaches children, explained that such setbacks were common and that he had already learned them to cope with it without losing your nerve live. They told him about the case thanks to a report in Mother Jones magazine, which asked several death row inmates early in the pandemic for recommendations on how to deal with incarceration; LaMar talked about jazz and how saxophonist John Coltrane saved his life. “I left high school at 16, but being here was a valuable education for me. “Thanks to music and literature,” the prisoner recalled in the interview with EL PAÍS, “I no longer had the feeling that I was serving my sentence and waiting for time to pass, but rather that I was taking advantage of it for the first time; I lived my life. I took the reins: literature and writing became a way of fighting and something that allowed me to keep my sanity.”
The Lucasville Riot
LaMar has been behind bars since he was 19 years old. Back then he was a dealer in Cleveland, in the golden age of crack, and one day he killed an addict, a childhood friend, when he came to his apartment to rob him. “I didn’t know it, but I wasn’t happy even though I was handling money and driving a Mercedes. I was lost. I lived in a different kind of prison,” he recalls. He received 18 years to life in prison. They sent him to Lucasville Prison in southern Ohio. Overcrowded and extremely violent, it was a powder keg about to explode at the time.
It was finally blown up four years later, in 1993, when the warden wanted to force Muslim prisoners to undergo a tuberculosis test in which they were injected with a serum that, they reported, contained alcohol, incompatible with their faith . That was the spark. A riot broke out on Holy Sunday, bringing together two of the prison’s dominant factions in a strange alliance: the white supremacists of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Gangster Disciples. They took control of Module L-6, that of LaMar’s cell, which was caught off guard by the riots in the yard. According to his story, the big mistake was insisting on searching for his few belongings to keep them safe. A man accused of “ragging” was locked in his cell and, as he says, gave up his mission. When the police intervened, he was back in the yard and they took him and hundreds of other prisoners to the next module, where they were stripped naked and finally locked in small cells by the tens. For LaMar, the tension grew until the next day one man killed another.
The National Guard surrounds Lucasville Prison during the 1993 uprising.Ralf-Finn Hestoft (Corbis via Getty Images)
This is one of the five murders attributed to him, not as the author of the strangulation, but as its instigator. They also accused him of leading a “death squad” that, the prosecution claimed in court, murdered four other “snitches” in the first hours of the uprising. The rebels, who took eight guards hostage, maintained control of Block L-6 for 11 days, which was televised across the country. Ten people died, nine inmates and prison officer Robert Vallandingham. In the end they surrendered with the promise that there would be no retaliation.
The uprising, which years later inspired a Netflix documentary, so impressed public opinion that authorities wanted to quickly find the culprits and impose an exemplary punishment. They sent five people to death row, four prisoners who rioted the entire time, prominent members of the three factions involved (Muslims, Neo-Nazis and Blacks), and LaMar. They were called the “Lucasville Five,” a term he doesn’t like to be associated with.
“Someone had to pay for it, and it was my turn,” he says thirty years later. “They needed a revolt to justify investing 50 million in a maximum security prison, this prison. As Noam Chomsky says: If you want to understand what happened, you have to look at the results it produced.”
Poverty and unemployment
The Ohio State Penitentiary is the so-called supermax, where the most dangerous prisoners are locked up in solitary confinement. There are 500 inmates housed there, but only LaMar and the others from Lucasville are on death row. Except for one of them, who was transferred for mental health reasons, they have never left it since its inauguration in 1998.
It’s in Youngstown, one of those small American towns in the middle of nowhere where the future seems to be the past. With a poverty rate of 35%, it lives largely off Supermax, the most generous employer in the area. It’s something of a lifeline that Ohio threw to its neighbors with the disappearance of the steel industry, the demise of which left behind a landscape of abandoned factories.
LaMar and Amy Gordieyev, at Ohio State Penitentiary last October.
The night before the appointment at the prison, an eerie, flat mass with no windows, Amy Gordieyev, an English teacher for migrant children and a supporter of the Justice for Keith LaMar campaign for more than a decade, clarified in a restaurant on the outskirts of Youngstown: “I “I don’t think Keith is innocent, just that I have absolutely no doubt about it.” With even more reason, he added after the release of the second season of the popular true crime podcast “The Real Killer,” which is spread out in eleven chapters “reviewed from the point of view of a journalist who has nothing to do with everything that surrounds Keith”. the blind spots of the trial that sent him to death row. A process “full of irregularities”.
“22,000 pieces of evidence were collected from the crime scene and none of them could be linked to him,” Gordieyev recalled, adding that prosecutors had hidden “mountains of exculpatory evidence,” such as the statements of one Anthony Walker, who appeared in three witness statements passed over. from saying that he didn’t see LaMar that day in Module L-6, to suggesting that he might have been there masked, to suggesting that he was the leader of the squad that killed the informants has. For Gordeyev, this shows how he made concessions while refreshing his memory. In the United States, the prosecution is required to share information of this type with the defense under the so-called Brady Doctrine, established by a historic Supreme Court ruling in the 1960s.
The case was built on the testimony of prisoners who were offered prison services. LaMar, he says, was tempted too, but he didn’t want to get involved in that game. They recommended that he plead guilty; Had he done so, he would not have been sentenced to death, he would have been spared three decades of isolation, and judging by his good behavior, he would most likely have been on the streets long ago. He didn’t accept it either. “I don’t regret anything,” he clarifies, “otherwise I would have become a confessed mass murderer.” “I would have had to live with it for the rest of my life, just as I live with the fact that I killed a man.”
Eventually, an all-white court convicted him and the judge gave him the maximum sentence. LaMar says he was a victim of a system in which 90% of prisoners end up behind bars after pleading guilty, whether they are guilty or not: “They had bazookas, we had slingshots. “The job of these prosecutors was to secure a guilty verdict, not to dispense justice.”
Seth Tieger, one of the prosecutors who sent him to prison in 1995, told The New York Times last year that he still believes LaMar is “extremely guilty.” “He is where he belongs: on death row,” he added. During these almost three decades, the prisoner has exhausted all avenues of appeal, and in all of them Tieger’s conclusions have been confirmed.
LaMar describes this legal ordeal in detail in Condemned, the memoir he self-published in 2014 and which defenders of his innocence have translated into three languages, including Spanish. He wrote it with the help of Gordieev, to whom he dictated the text by telephone every morning at dawn and at other times of the day. “It was a laborious process,” she remembers. “And expensive. They were calls lasting a maximum of 15 minutes at four dollars each.”
The prisoner has a copy in the small library in his cell. He proudly says that he keeps it “between two books.” [los grandes escritores negros] James Baldwin and Richard Wright.” It wasn’t always like that. As part of the exemplary punishment imposed on him, they not only imposed isolation but also prohibited him from possessing records and books. He was also not allowed physical contact with his relatives during visits, a right he eventually gained through several hunger strikes, inspired by the example of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands.
“The first thing they give you on death row is a television,” LaMar says. “It’s like a cruel window to the outside, so you can stare at it all day and live your life through it. So you don’t have to think. I refused.” He tries to watch only PBS, the strictly public broadcaster, and his favorite times to read, listen to music with headphones and write are two and six in the morning, “when the prison is quiet.”
Freedom First Project’s first concert at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
LaMar discovered jazz at age 25 thanks to a prisoner named Snoop; Back when I was a teenager, I mostly listened to soul: Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Luther Vandross… In jazz it started with Coltrane, and then came Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Keith Jarrett and Joe Henderson. “The albums of these geniuses are like galaxies,” he explains. “In these compositions full of nuance and frequency lies the full complexity of the African American experience.”
The idea that he should recite the music came from Marquès. “I encouraged him because I think he is a good writer,” the pianist recalls. He also asked him to make a list of 10 songs to start working on the project. They connected immediately. “People are surprised that a boy from Granollers and a black man from Ohio can get along, but for me he is already a friend, like a brother,” says Marquès, also convinced of his innocence. “They often ask me how this could have happened,” the prisoner adds. “Crucially, Albert was not born in the United States. He didn’t grow up with the preconceived notion that a poor black man is only capable of terrible things, never anything sublime. For me, jazz was like a Trojan horse: it allowed me to make my story accessible to more people through music that became a bridge. People who don’t necessarily think about the death penalty.” About 75 musicians took part in the project, many of them without pay. Profits from the album will go towards the LaMar publishing campaign and half of the sales of Marquès’ book.
The jazz adventure helped raise public awareness of the case and caught the attention of a famous civil rights attorney named Keegan Stephan. He had read LaMar’s book and gone to New York to one of Freedom First’s concerts. He became involved in the defense, which in recent months has been joined by a powerful, selfless law firm. They review a lot of legal documents, also based on insights from the podcast. Although he has exhausted all possible legal remedies, LaMar hopes the case can be reopened. “It’s the first time in thirty years that I’ve played with all the cards. In this country, if you don’t have money, you don’t have a chance.” The public defenders who defended him in the 1990s barely charged $100 an hour. It would cost hundreds of thousands to pay those who are now helping him for free.
When asked why he believes Ohio State has kept him waiting for his final hour for almost thirty years, LaMar replied, “They make you fight for your life all the time. They are like vultures, wanting to harvest every last piece of your flesh, like a modern-day lynching. And an empty cell only means one thing to them: that they are losing money.”
He says he feels fortunate to have developed a dense support network that other prisoners who no one calls or goes to lack. He receives about three visitors a week and is in constant contact with the outside world, especially because his campaign has money to pay the phone, a bill that runs between $16 and $20 a day.
“The guards don’t understand why I arouse so much interest. They look at me and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ Do you think you’re someone important?’ And I know that I am. “It doesn’t occur to them that you can overcome this shitty life,” he says. There are also fears that postponing his murder would cause blisters, so he suspects something was put in his food months ago that caused him severe dizziness. All kinds of analyzes were carried out and “by the deductive method” he concluded that there could be no other explanation. “I know it sounds crazy. I’m the first to watch for any sign that I’m losing my mind, but there just isn’t any.” The dizziness disappeared as he began to look at the cans he’d bought at the supermarket and the sandwiches, to which his visitors invited him to feed.
After eating two pieces of chicken, at the end of the conversation about death row came a question, perhaps silly, perhaps born of curiosity, perhaps universal: What will he do first when he is finally released? “Many things,” he replied. “For example, go to a jazz festival in San Sebastián. I’ve never seen a jazz concert. I haven’t flown by plane yet either. But most of all: continue to take my life seriously. I learned too late.”
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