Remember Attica

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 and one indictment of a state trooper, subsequently dropped for lack of evidence.

The 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.

It 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 as Rockefeller implied when he praised them for doing "a superb job," and that Rockefeller's appointment of state police to investigate their own actions made "nearly impossible the prosecution of government officials," not to mention their superiors, like the governor himself.

The 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 the prisoners' grievances even though he considered many of them legitimate. Because his negligence resulted in 39 deaths, Rockefeller is potentially just as guilty of crimes at Attica as those guards who pulled the triggers for him.

The investigation of the Attica massacre should continue at all levels--especially at that of the governor and his advisors. And because, as the Meyer report says, members of the two recently-disbanded grand juries from nearby Wyoming County displayed "partiality and emotion...in considering charges against enforcement personnel who were their friends and neighbors," a new grand jury should be formed in another county to consider more justly the charges brought before it. Finally, the inmates convicted for their roles in the Attica uprising should be retried.