Click the image above to print a form letter to sign and mail to the Governor urging him to support Trotter’s Clemency petition!
In 1987 Christopher “Naeem” Trotter was sentenced to 142 years for charges stemming from the 1985 uprising against white supremacist guard brutality at Pendleton CF (then known as the the Indiana State Reformatory). At the time of the uprising, Trotter had nearly completed a 4 year sentence for petty theft. He had been placed in the maximum security Pendleton prison because of his history as a combat veteran with the US Special Forces.
In 2018, after a long legal ordeal and 20 years in solitary confinement, that sentence was vacated and a Madison County, IN court ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held, on the basis that the prosecution had seriously misrepresented Trotter’s motivations for his actions in the uprising as well as his personal background. The prosecution had presented Trotter as the “Black sheep” of a middle class family who simply decided to act violently for no real reason. In fact, he was raised in poverty with a violently abusive father who used to beat his mother and little brother, and Chris grew up protecting them from his father’s abuse. As such, he was responding to a conditioned protective instinct when he heard calls for help and learned that guards were beating a well-loved jailhouse lawyer, Lokmar, to death with his hands cuffed behind his back on the Maximum Restraint Unit. It was because of his history of protecting people more vulnerable than him from abuse that he leapt into action and helped set off the rebellion that saved Lokmar and possibly others on that unit from being beaten to death by white supremacist guards in tactical gear. Those guards had already come through the unit and shaken everyone down multiple times that day, to the point that all they had left was their underwear, before they began bludgeoning Lokmar in the head. In the trials related to the uprising, it was revealed that the guards were specifically targeting Lokmar, and intended to kill him. At least one of the guards involved was convicted and sentenced to federal prison for provoking the uprising.
Trotter’s trial lawyer in 1987 failed to challenge the prosecution’s representation of his motives for the crimes he was convicted of, and because of that fact in 2018 a judge ruled that Trotter had a valid claim of ineffective assistance of counsel in his post-conviction relief case, and that a new sentence should be issued in accordance with the recommendations of a new pre-sentencing investigation. You can read the judge’s order to vacate the 1987 sentence in the documents below.
A new sentencing hearing was held in January 2019, but in a move that clearly illustrates the blatant corruption involved in Chris’s case, the Madison County judge who had vacated his original sentence was taken off the case. The new judge on the case, Judge Carroll, re-sentenced Christopher Trotter to 122 years in prison, saying in court that the guards expected him to have their backs.
