Long term Indiana political prisoner Aaron Isby-Israel has a habeas corpus hearing this Thursday, December 15 at 11:00am, via Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82077320168?pwd=cHdwZWo3YklDcXhHdVNQamd2d1g1Zz09 and PIN 049434.
If Mr. Isby-Israel is successful in this hearing, he will be released from prison after over 30 years of incarceration, 28 of which he spent illegally held in solitary confinement.
In 1990, Mr. Isby-Israel was falsely accused by a guard at the notoriously racist Indiana Reformatory of assault, after the guard called him a racial slur. That guard recanted his accusation in May 2021 and provided an affidavit to Mr. Isby-Israel stating that he had never attacked him. Nonetheless, after the accusation in 1990 Mr. Isby-Israel was thrown in solitary confinement and subsequently attacked by a cell-extraction squad using dogs, teargas, and firehoses. In the melee, two guards and a dog were injured. Mr. Isby-Israel was then charged with two counts of attempted murder, and found guilty by an all white jury in a kangaroo court in Anderson, Indiana.
For the next 28 years, Mr. Isby-Israel was held in indefinite solitary confinement, and participated in many struggles against the prison authorities’ human rights abuses. Most notably, in 1991, he participated in the mass hunger strike at Indiana’s first super maximum security solitary confinement prison, the Maximum Control Complex (now Westville Control Unit), that IDOC had built to put down the prisoner movement of the previous decades. Mr. Isby-Israel remained on hunger strike for close to a month, until he was ordered to be force-fed to end his strike. He is a prolific jailhouse lawyer and a mentor to many younger prisoners he has interacted with over the years, as well as a correspondent for IDOC Watch. In 2018 he won a precedent-setting lawsuit challenging Indiana’s indefinite solitary confinement regime, and was released to general population.
In January 2022, he submitted an appeal of his classification to IDOC authorities requesting that 6 years of credit time that had been baselessly taken from him be returned, and did not receive a response. Several months later IDOC Watch sent the same request certified to all of the appropriate authorities and various civil society groups, and shortly thereafter Mr. Isby-Israel received a letter from IDOC Regional Director Richard Brown stating – seemingly unwittingly – that his release date was in May 2019. This letter, as well as Mr. Isby-Israel’s own calculation of his sentence, is what the habeas corpus hearing on December 15 will address.
Please follow the link above and PIN to connect to the hearing. After registering on the website, you will be placed in a waiting room until the hearing starts. In order to connect to the video hearing, you will need audio and video access to the hearing. This requires an internet connection and webcam. In the alternative, you will be able to connect to the audio via your computer or by calling in with a telephone by dialing 1-312-626-6799 US (Chicago) and then enter the Meeting ID: 820 7732 0168 and PIN/Passcode: 049434. Please refer to Indiana Code of Judicial Conduct Rule 2.17, which prohibits the recording and broadcasting of court proceedings.
