January 2, 2024 • 45 mins
As Imam Jamil grapples with “soul crushing” conditions in an exceptionally harsh prison, new evidence emerges that suggests the FBI is holding onto secrets about the shootout.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
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Speaker 2 (00:17):
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Speaker 3 (00:36):
Enjoy the episode Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
When European settlers arrived in the colonies in the seventeenth century,
they brought the death penalty with them. The first recorded
execution by Europeans was carried out in sixteen oh eight,
long before American independence and the ratification of the Constitution.
Crime subject to the death penalty have included murder, robbery, rape,
(01:09):
horse dealing, and aiding a runaway slave. For most of
the twentieth century, the state of Georgia electrocuted intimates to
death right up until the time of a mam Jamial's arrest, actually,
but the courts ruled that cruel and unusual, so when
a Maam Jamil's life was put in the hands of
twelve good folks from Georgia. He faced lethal injection that
(01:32):
was supposed to be more humane. A Mam Jamil's defense
team felt the pressure. Their arguments, the words they chose,
even their facial expressions. It could all affect the jury's opinion.
A mistake, a poor choice could lead to a mam
Jamial being sentenced to death and ultimately killed. A Mam
(01:53):
Jamial's defense attorney, Tony Axam.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I would be asking to save his life. So that's all.
That's a tremendous bird. You've said, jurors, he's not guilty.
There's not enough evidence, and now you have to come
in front of that same jury and say, okay, let's
(02:17):
assume you got it right. I have a second argument
for you. He should live.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
The prosecution was the first side to call witnesses. Deputy
Kinchin's mother took the stand. She said when she was
at home, she found herself sitting next to the phone
waiting for her son to call. Kinchin's sister said his
death left her depressed and angry. Kinchin's wife said he
had been a good father and that some days she
(02:47):
just sat and cried. The defense called witnesses in an
effort to show that a man Jimil and the decades
before the shooting, had lived a life of service. Andrew Young,
the former mayor of Atlanta and aid to doctor King,
he was a defense witness. Remember it was Young who,
nearly twenty years after this day in court, wrote a
(03:09):
letter to the Fulton County DA's office arguing that AmAm
Jamial was innocent. Young said that he and a Maam
Jamil or h. Rat Brown at the time, met briefly
in the sixties. They weren't close, but Young still knew
that Rapp had lived through Jim Crow worked in the
rural South, endured violence, and spent much of his life
(03:29):
as part of a movement pushing to improve the lives
of black people that counted for something. The way Young
saw it, Axem told me and Maam Jamil had built
up some credits going through all that credit to some
imaginary system weighing the value of human lives.
Speaker 5 (03:46):
So he should be spared.
Speaker 6 (03:50):
Now we're at two thousand and we still don't have freedom.
And that's the storm that Jamil Alamin weathered, and being
in that storm, he deserves to live even if you
think that he did it, spare his life, let him live.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
In their closing arguments, the prosecution to the murder was
especially vile and that it showed a Maam Jamil was depraved.
Prosecutors showed gruesome, bloody photos of Kinchin's wounds. They said
it mattered that it was a sheriff's deputy who was killed,
and by sentencing a Maam Jamil to die, the jury
would be signaling that violence against law enforcement won't be tolerated.
(04:33):
Jack Martin, in his closing argument, stressed the power that
society had put in the hands of the jury. What
is to be decided now, he said, is the most
important decision that any person ever makes in their whole life,
the most important decision that any democracy or any government
ever makes, the one time that we presume to be
god like. I appeal to your best, not your worst,
(04:57):
Martin said. I appeal to your hopes for the future,
not your fears. I appealed to the possibility and the
reality of redemption in all of us, not the brutal
satisfaction of revenge.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
Not the worst than us.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
AmAm Jamil didn't fear execution, and as the jury deliberated
on a sentence. He put everything in the hands of
a law. After five hours, the jury decided against the
death penalty and they sentenced a Mam Jamil to life
in prison without parole. From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and
(05:39):
iHeart Podcasts, This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode five,
Cherry Pie, AmAm Jamille h.
Speaker 5 (06:07):
Rat Brown.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
He had a gift for delivering unforgettable lines. But there's
one phrase that's stuck in our culture memory more than
any other. He said it in the speech in nineteen
sixty seven during the long hot Summer of Black Rebellion.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Violence is a plot of America's culture.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
It is as American as cherry pie.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Violence is as American as cherry pie. It's meant as
a statement of fact, one of those beautiful phrases that's
simple and profound. At the same time, Rap wasn't saying
that violence is inherently good. He was saying that violence
is America, and America is violence. America was founded with violence,
built with violence, and persists because of violence. Never mind
(06:52):
that Americans eat apple pie way more than cherry pie.
The slip better conjures up the red bloodiness of it all.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
I was still obsessed with getting to.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
The bottom of what happened on the ninth of March sixteenth,
two thousand. The evidence that came out at trial, it
was too shaky for me to set aside the possibility
that a Mamjimial was wrongfully convicted. But I was pulled
in another direction too. I needed to investigate this American violence,
how it operates, and the consequences, however dark or disguised
(07:24):
they might be. I since it was key to understanding
a Maamjamial and to understanding the eruption of violence in
the West End, whether a Mam Jamil was involved or not.
After AmAm Jamil was convicted and sentenced, law enforcement officials
held a secret meeting with the warden of Reidsville Prison
(07:45):
in Tattnall County, Georgia. A Maam Jamil was going to
be transferred there. Tattnall County's story is America's story crammed
into five hundred square miles of swamps and rolling hills
in southeastern Georgia. One point a quarter of the county's
population was enslaved raising beef, cattle, and cotton under the
Georgia sun and under the threat of death, rape, and
(08:08):
family separation. Much of Tattenneau County's success at the time,
according to an official county website, can be attributed to
slave labor.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Then the State of Georgia opened.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
A prison near the county seat, Readsville, and much of
the county's growth in the last thirty five years, again,
according to an official county website, can be attributed to
Regisville Prison. In that secret meeting, law enforcement officials told
the warden that thirty to fifty thousand people had vowed
(08:41):
to save a Maam Demial and to spirit him away
from the State of Georgia by force if necessary. Thirty
to fifty thousand people before law enforcement flew a Maamjamial
to Reedsville in a helicopter. They set up a five
mile perimeter around the prison. A Ma'am Tarak Khan was
the sole Muslim chape at the prison.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
When a Man Jamial arrived.
Speaker 7 (09:02):
They treated it like al chapo, right like that there
was gonna be you know, this army is going to
break him out of something, and the snipers and everybody
outside and trucks and this and that and bring him
in in a hui, you know, and all of that
kind of stuff, and uh, it wasn't none of that.
You know, they just overdo stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
A Mam Tarik had met a Man Jamil before on
the outside. They seen each other at basketball games, and
a Mam Tark went to the Western Mastet a couple
of times as a chaplain. He had seen guards abuse
inmates for basically no reason, and he worried they would
give a man Jamil an especially hard time. So after
the helicopter landed the Hueiye, he went to check on him.
Speaker 7 (09:47):
I wanted to stay there a little longer that day
to make sure that when hey body men, that he
didn't get scraped up, you know.
Speaker 8 (09:56):
What I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Reedsville was one of the state's highest security prisons. Politicians
called inmates there the worst of the worst. A Ma'am Jimil,
now nearly sixty years old, was held in a unit
named K Building and solitary Confinement. The doors to the
cells and K Building were solid metal, except for a
slot for a tray of food and a flap guards
(10:22):
would open to handcuff the inmates. A Maam Jamil's cell
was probably eight feet by ten feet, just enough room
for him to take three steps in either direction. He
was forced to spend twenty four hours a day inside
his cell, except for the occasions he was given an
hour to go outside to get some fresh air and
direct sunlight, but even then he was still inside a cage.
(10:46):
Our systems of public safety are built on the idea
that in order to protect the public, we must harm
some individuals. Punishment is a kind of harm, a kind
of violence. Often that as a society we have read
a person deserves because of the acts they committed. The
death penalty is an obvious example of violence if it's
(11:07):
squarely into the most common definition, the exercise of physical
force against another, and the practice of solitary confinement isn't
too far off. Most often, state violence is concealed by
bureaucracy and innocuous terms corrections, k building, even confinement.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
They were really stringent on him, thinking that he was
going to have control over people there, you know what
I mean. But you know, he had an even mindset
about him being in there. He wasn't panicking, you know,
he just this is where I'm at, you know, this
is the hand I'm in debt, So I'm here.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
A man Jamil was in solitary confinement, but he wasn't
completely isolated. He could see visitors, and he had them
almost every weekend in holiday. His wife Karima and their
son Kyrie came about three times a month. Sister Karima,
an attorney herself by this time, was working with a
legal team to appeal to Mam Jimil's conviction and the
(12:11):
Maam Jamil supporters. At least once a year, around Thanksgiving
and Christmas, they gathered outside the prison to protest his
conviction and his treatment inside. A Maam Jamil communicated with
the other inmates in K Building by talking through air
ducts between the cells. A Maam Tarak told us that
AmAm Jamil gave the Shahada, the Muslim oath to a
(12:32):
white supremacist and K Building that he converted the guy
to Alam. A tale, maybe a true one from the
legend of AmAm Jamil. A Ma'am Tark. He visited a
K Building pretty regularly.
Speaker 7 (12:48):
It wasn't necessarily a special trip for him per se.
But I've made short of when I went over there
that I got a chance to talk with him. I
called officer officer to dropped slot. There's a little slot
there and they would drop the slot. So I don't
have to talk in the crack of the door. But
you know, I used to talk to him periodically, you
(13:09):
know what I mean. And he always had good spirits.
You know what I mean. He's locked up, don't have anything,
and then ask you is anything I could do for
you? You know what you need anything? I mean, that's his
first words, you know, I mean, you locked up?
Speaker 5 (13:20):
What you got?
Speaker 7 (13:21):
You know what I'm saying. So, but that's how he was.
He always did that. Even if you see him now,
he'll say the same thing.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I know from court documents that when a Mamjamil arrived
at regivial prison, the warden was immediately suspicious and wary
of him. Mam Jamil was accused at least three times
of being involved in escape plots. I'm talking Shawshank redemption
type stuff here. One time he was allegedly caught hanging
out near a broken window on the other side of
the glass, a rope made of sheets and a hacksaw.
(13:52):
He denied all of it, but the possibility of mam
Jamil's escape that was just the beginning of the warden's concerns.
In a memo from July two thousand and two, months
after a Maam Jamil was convicted. The warden said that
AmAm Jamil had the potential and influence to be a
definite threat. This at the same time, he said that
(14:14):
AmAm Jamil hadn't created any trouble, that his behavior was acceptable,
and that the warden expected his behavior would continue to be.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Acceptable to me.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
This contradiction that a Maam Jamil was a threat but
also well behaved the warden was revealing a deeper fear,
something like the evil energy that the US Marshall felt
in that Alabama courtroom standing near him. The myth of
a man Jamil. It was spreading out of a man
Jamil's control and gaining traction among people with the power
(14:48):
to punish. In two thousand and five, after three years
of prison time, a Muslim inmate and a different facility
is in a Mam Jamila message. The other guy wanted
to know if a Mam Jamil would assume leadership over Muslims.
(15:09):
Throughout the Georgia Department of Corrections, unifying Muslim inmates at
over fifty prisons, a Ma'am Jamil said yes. A document
was circulated for other Muslim inmates to sign if they
agreed to pledge baya or loyalty to a man Jamil.
The mission as it's laid out in the copy of
the document we have seemed noble enough. It said, Look,
(15:32):
Muslims aren't treated well in Georgia prisons. If we come
together under a Mam Jamil, we can better advocate for
ourselves and that will ultimately help us be better Muslims.
But a Ma'am Tarik he didn't think this was a
good idea, even though he had a lot of respect
for a Maam Jamil.
Speaker 7 (15:51):
I think a few brothers told me about it, and
they would ask me about it, and I told him, no,
that's not gonna happen, because that would even that at
that particular time, would trump the other authority that is there.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
The wardens ran the prisons period, and they would shut
down any other parallel hierarchy. When prison administration learned of
the BAI, they talked to a Maam Jimial about it
and he said he would instruct the other Muslims to
quash the effort. That would be the end of that.
But in June of two thousand and six, about six
(16:30):
months after the BAI began, the FBI published an internal
report with the title the attempt to radicalize the Georgia
Department of Corrections inmate population. The report called AmAm Jimil
an Islamic extremist.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Basically a terrorist.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
It ran through his biography, even quoted his fiery speech in.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Cambridge, Maryland.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The FBI report narrowed in on a few lines in
the BAI document, and maybe reasonably so. One of the
lines said the Georgia Department of Corrections is a battlefield
and we need a general to coordinate and direct us,
and another a quote from an Islamic text. It suggested
violence against anyone who challenges the leader. Here's this idea again.
(17:17):
Violence is a means for the greater good. It's scary
for authorities when they're facing it too. It's why so
much of the response from the FEDS was based on
what they thought a man Jamil might do or how
they imagine others might respond to him.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Not what actually happened.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
One passage of the report reads, it should be noted
that any statements made by Alamine could be taken in
an extreme nature, and the content could be potentially dangerous,
even if Alamine's intent was innocuous and Mama Jamil became
bigger than he actually was, scarier than he actually was,
because the fear of violence freaks you the fuck out.
(17:57):
One morning in two thousand and seven, prison guards showed
up at a mamm Jimial cell and k building. They
took him out through the rear gate of the prison,
where there was a caravan waiting. The guards put him
in the back of an suv. We got you now
that Mam Jamil, said, one of the guards told him.
Then they drove off. In the most common definition of violence,
(18:39):
like I mentioned a few minutes ago, the word simply
means to exercise physical force against another. But there are
also meetings of violence, obsolete uses dating back to the
fifteenth century that define it as an abuse of power
or authority that persecutes or oppresses. These days, we don't
really call that violence. No blood, no visible injury, But
(19:03):
the consequences of such violence that we don't really call violence,
they're very real, tangible. The FBI surveillance of a Mamjmial
the infiltration of the mass JD by informants, it could
fall under this lesser used definition of violence, And the
more I learned about the extent and duration of the
surveillance the more I was convinced that it contributed to
(19:25):
the shootout where there was very real blood a Ma'am
Jamil's wife, Karima Elamine, she got information from the FBI
that helped me draw this conclusion. Sister Karima is a lawyer,
one I'm acquainted with. Actually, she represented me and my
(19:45):
wife on our green card application. Embarrassingly enough, I didn't
realize at the time who her husband was. We reconnected
when I started working on this project, and she was
as nice as ever, though she did tell me that
my generation needs to know more of its history. Sister
Kareema is pretty private and she didn't want to be interviewed,
but we were able to find a recording of her
(20:07):
from a rally to support AmAm Jamil that happened in Harlem.
Speaker 8 (20:16):
He struggle.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Rallies for a man Jamil weren't uncommon after he was
convicted and placed in isolation. This is one of the
larger ones we've come across. There were about two hundred
people there. Here's sister Kareema.
Speaker 9 (20:31):
I do want to extend email Jamil and I do
call him Emaim Jamil. I want to extend his greetings
and his appreciation and he would say, I Salamu a
leako to everyone, and that's how I begin, and I
begin in the name of Allah the most Merciful.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Soon after she and Rap began their relationship, the FBI
contacted her sister.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
Karama's family were part of a.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Black power group and they had been arrested. The FBI
tried to make a deal with Kareema.
Speaker 9 (21:07):
They wanted me to tell them where my husband might
soon to be husband, where he was traveling. And they
told me at that time, well, if you help us,
will drop the chargees against your sister and her husband.
And I said, well, you know they were frayed, so
I'm not even going to go there. I'm not going
(21:29):
to cooperate. Five years later, my husband is still saying
he could never figure out whether I had cooperated or not.
He's still telling me that, right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's sort of a dark joke, but also an ugly
thing to have between a couple. Sister Karma said that
when Rapp was a target of the FBI, the bureau
harassed both of their parents so intensely that her father
dropped dead in the street after some officials visited him
in his job. A month later, a Mamjimialsma died and
four months after that, Sister Karima's mother died. And let's
(22:05):
not forget the car bomb.
Speaker 9 (22:09):
It brought out a family closer and closer to him.
Why they demonstrated the extent and the degree that they
will go to divide family.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
After a Mam Jamil was convicted, Sister Karma filed a
Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI. It told
her that they had twenty one thousand, six hundred and
forty nine pages of records potentially responsive to her request.
Twenty one thousand, six hundred and forty nine. Maybe at
one point there had been even more records on a
Mam Jamil, but the FBI said many were damaged in
(22:46):
a flood.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Two years later, after Sister Karma submitted their request, the
FBI turned over almost seven hundred pages.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
When I look through the.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Documents, there were two things I saw that suggest the
FBI was at least linked to the shooting of Deputy
Kinchin and Deputy English. I don't mean they somehow orchestrated
the thing. What I mean is that the FBI, they
were up in the mix. First, there were three handwritten words.
(23:18):
It was placed remember how when a Mam Jmial was
captured in Lowndes County, Alabama, an FBI agent named Ron
Campbell and kicked and spit on him. Campbell had a
troubled history with the Bureau. Was accused of shooting an
African American Muslim in the back of the head and
planting a gun at the scene in Philadelphia. While Campbell
(23:38):
was chasing a Mam Demial, he fell in the swamp,
he'd say later, and was on his own for at
least a few minutes. During the trial, the defense called
Campbell to testify. Here's a ma'am Jamil's lead defense attorney,
Jack Martin.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
We knew that Campbell was willing to plant out as
he was a corrupt FBI agent. The gun was not
on at the time he was arrested. It was supposedly
found later, and they found the gun on the ground.
I wonder why they didn't find the grun in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I said this earlier, but I'll say it again. We
contacted Campbell, but he didn't agree to an interview. An
internal investigation cleared Campbell in that Philadelphia case and he
was never charged with anything related to it. And we
don't have any evidence Campbell was a corrupt agent. That's
just what Martin thought. After a man Jimial was captured
(24:31):
that same night, a sergeant on the dog tracking team
found a nine millimeter pistol near the edge of the woods.
Speaker 8 (24:40):
Why would ala mean if you had this shootout in
the lad with his gun, had brought it with him
to Alabama, why wouldn't he just.
Speaker 5 (24:47):
Get rid of it?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
The document's sister Karima got from the FBI. They included
handwritten notes of a debrief with the sergeant on the
dog tracking team, and the notes from the FBI said,
apparently paraphrasing the sergeant about the gun, that it was
placed like maybe the sergeant told the FBI that it
looked like the pistol had been planted. That one handwritten
(25:12):
note it supported the argument that the FBI conspired to
get a mam Jamil convicted. We tried to ask the
sergeant about this, but he didn't agree to an interview.
Law enforcement found another gun in the woods too, a
Ruger Many fourteen rifle. Like with the pistol of mam
Jamial's fingerprints weren't found on the rifle. Both guns were
(25:34):
ultimately linked to a mam Jamil in the shooting.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
But you know, like I've.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Said before, ballistics analysis linking a specific gun to a
specific bullet, it has no basis in science. But if
the guns were placed, were they identical models that law
enforcement could have gotten anywhere? Were they brought all the
way from Georgia. Attorney Martin has a theory for that.
Speaker 8 (25:57):
It only would be plausible if some ount know of it.
The undercover agent for the FBI, whoever collected the gun
in Atlanta or got a gun that matched the situation
and brought it to Alabama.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Basically, Martin is saying someone somehow connected to the FBI
who was in and around the mass Jed at the
time of the shooting, they helped execute a frame job.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
And so that brings me.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
To the second thing in the documents that sister Karima
got from the FBI proof the bureau was surveiling a
Mamjamial just days before the shootout on March sixteenth, two thousand.
The documents are heavily redacted, but I can see that
they include regular reports and surveillance of a mam Jamial
and the mass Jed, and the surveillance actually appeared to
escalate in the months before the shootout.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
Let me start at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
March nineteen ninety eight, during two hours of surveillance, the subject,
a Maam Jamil, was not observed. April ninety eight, agents
drove through the West End and saw a Mam Jmil
standing on the deck behind his corner store across from
the mass Gen. February nineteen ninety nine, a confidential source
(27:14):
told someone at the FBI a piece of information significant
enough that it was shared with FBI headquarters, and the
surveillance appeared to intensify. April ninety nine, an agent saw
a Mam Jamil unload something from a dark green Ford
Explorer with and this is noted in the report dealer tags.
(27:36):
The next month, a mam Jamil was pulled over in
that Ford Explorer because he was driving with dealer tags,
and then arrested for allegedly driving a stolen vehicle. Then
there were FBI reports in May, June, July, and August
of ninety nine, all redacted. In October there's another long report.
(27:58):
It describes a Mamgmil as the leader of a network
of masters in the US that are quote involved in
violent crimes and gained their funding from countries in opposition
to the philosophical.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
Standing of the United States.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Alamin is well known to law enforcement authorities as an
active militant.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
End quote the.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Philosophical standing of the United States. That sounds to me
like something you'd expect to find in a coin tell
pro document from the sixties. In February two thousand, the
FBI got an updated driver's license vhoto of a mamm
Jimil from the Georgia State Patrol and on March sixth
of two thousand, just ten days before the shootout, there's
(28:40):
a memo with a section at the bottom reporting a
mam Jmial was charged with failing to appear in court
on that stolen vehicle charge. It was his failure to
appear that led to the warrant that Kentin and English
had with them in the West End on March sixteenth.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
Two thousand.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Despite all their redactions in the documents, they said a
lot the FBI could have done work behind the scenes
to get a mam Jamil arrested in that Ford Explorer.
They could have had someone running surveillance in the West
End at the time of the shootout, someone who might
have helped plan a weapon in the woods. That all
seemed possible to me. Some of it even seemed likely.
(29:22):
Now I knew that the FBI is pursued of a
man Jamil of h rap Brown, what we can call
a kind of violence against him and his family and
his community.
Speaker 5 (29:32):
It hadn't stopped at the end of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It didn't even stop once he was convicted and placed
in solitary confinement in Georgia. Because the FBI's reported about
a Mamjmial while he was in prison, the one that
labeled him an Islamic extremist. That report helped justify even
more violence, violence that some might call.
Speaker 5 (29:55):
Soul crushing.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
In two thousand and seven, five years after he was convicted,
when a Ma'am Jamil was taken out of his cell
in the early morning, put in the back of an
suv and driven away from Reedsville Prison in Tattnall County, Georgia.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
He had no idea where he.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Was being taken. We got you now, he said.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
A guard told.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Him, I wonder where a Maam Jamil thought he might
be going when he heard that. It's not something an
iniminate here. As before being taken to a medical appointment
or a court date. Now this was much more ominous.
It had to be worse than solitary confinement in Georgia's
toughest prison, where Ma'am Jamil had already been. Did his
(30:53):
mind turn to the car bomb? Did he think about
waterboarding Guantanamo? Or did he trust his government to follow
the rule of law?
Speaker 5 (31:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
An airport about a three hour drive away from Reedsville
was their first stop. A Mam Jamil sat waiting for
several more hours in the back seat of a van,
his feet shackled, his hands cuffed and chained to his waist.
By this time, a Maam Jamil had picked up that
the Feds had him, but he still didn't know where
he was going. At five in the evening, now ten
(31:29):
hours after he was taken out of his cell, he
complained he was having chest pains and needed to see
a doctor. When he got out of the vehicle, he collapsed,
and after some back and forth among the guards, he
was taken to a hospital. There was an issue with
his heart. It's not clear exactly what it was, but
he underwent a procedure under anesthesia. Two days later, a
(31:52):
Maam Jamil was finally taken onto a plane and flown
to Oklahoma and then to Colorado. He was driven west
through the desert.
Speaker 10 (32:02):
There's mountains around it. The area itself is beautiful, but
it becomes more and more remote until finally you get
to this place that feels a little bit like the
end of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Laura Rovner is an attorney and one of the few
people who has spent time inside the federal prison where
Maam Jamil was taken in Florence, Colorado. The place's full
name is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, but it's
known as ADX Florence, a supermax prison considered the most
secure in the world. The Georgia Department of Corrections had
(32:37):
requested that the federal government take custody of a. Maam Jamil,
citing the FBI's finding that he was an Islamic extremist.
Laura the attorney. She teaches law at the University of Denver,
where she runs a civil rights clinic. She took on
her first client from ADX Florence in two thousand and six,
suing the government over the conditions there.
Speaker 10 (32:58):
With her students help, and then the students and I
went on to represent a number of other people. And
then the more work that I did, the more it
became apparent how necessary it was and how really unspeakably
bad the conditions were.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
About three hundred Americans and foreign citizens are incarcerated at
ADX Florence. Joaquin al Chapo Gusman, the former drug lord
from Mexico known for his brazen prison escapes, one of
the Boston Marathon bombers, men involved in the bombing of
the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety three, and at
least nine members of al Qaeda. Those are just some
(33:38):
of the most famous in the federal system. After nine
to eleven, a disproportionate percentage of Muslims, by one estimate,
seventy percent were incarcerated at high security prisons.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
The federal government.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Opened EIGHTYX Florence in nineteen ninety four. Laura told me
that as the prison population in the United States grew
dramatically during the eighties and nineties, prisons, as you might expect,
became overcrowded, sentences were longer, inmates grew more hopeless, and
they became more violent. The idea behind opening the supermax
(34:15):
facility was to isolate potentially violent inmates ad X Florence
looks like a one or two story red brick building
that's built into the side of a hill. It's sort
of unassuming on the outside except for the circles of
barbed wire and the watchtower. When AmAm Jamil first arrived there,
(34:35):
he might have felt like he was being taken underground,
and it probably would have felt disorienting. There are a
few windows and little or no natural light.
Speaker 10 (34:46):
In terms of what people's experiences like, kind of on
the way they are entering it, I think people are
are generally afraid, not knowing what to expect, not knowing
if they're going to be there forever or if they're
going to have any ability to get out eventually.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
A mam Jamil would have been taken to his own cell.
Everyone in ADX is in solitary confinement. The atmosphere is clinical, cold, austere,
the way a mam Jamil put it. If Reidsville Prison
was run by the KKK, ADIAX Florence is run by Nazis.
He had been in solitary confinement in Reidsville Prison too,
(35:29):
but the conditions at ADAX Florence they were more profoundly isolating.
The prison seems designed to sever a person's access to
an influence on society. If part of what we humans
are doing as conscious beings on this earth is acting
on impulses from somewhere deep down to shape the world
around us. Adix Florence walls off those deeper portions the
(35:52):
souls of people. The religious might say, with thick, thick concrete,
some souls are just too dangerous. Each individual cell is
(36:12):
eight feet by ten feet, about three steps to get
from one side to the other. The walls are white
or grayish green. There's a cement platform bed, a shower,
a cement desk, a port cement stool in front of
the desk, and a TV. The cells have solid doors
that limit communication with anyone outside. Five days a week,
(36:36):
a Mammed Demal was able to spend an hour outdoors.
He was taken fully shackled to what Laura describes as
an empty swimming pool with cages dropped in it. The
view from inside the cages more concrete. A Mammed de
Meal could see the sky, maybe a plane flying overhead,
but nothing of the landscape, not even the mountains he
would have passed when he was transported to the prison.
Speaker 10 (37:01):
There are people who have talked about going out to
those exercise cages and you know that somehow, there some
miracle of nature, some little blade of grass was growing
up under the cement, and you know, some of the
people who were in the cages at different times were
able to see it, and we're just so excited by
it because it was the only nature that they had seen.
(37:21):
I mean, you don't see anything out your window except cement. Also,
and you know, talked about the cruelty of one of
the staff coming and just pulling out this, you know,
one little blade of grass, and it's just so incredibly
evocative and symbolic to me of what the space is like.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
AmAm Jamil can make two or three fifteen minute calls
each month. Sister Karma and their youngest son, Kyrie, they
came to visit him much less frequently in Colorado than
they had in Georgia. Reidsville Prison is two hundred miles
from Atlanta. Eighty X Florence is fourteen hundred. On the
days that sister Karima and Kyrie did come to ADX Florence,
(38:07):
a Mam Jamil was taken to the visiting area and
he sat across from them, still handcuffed and shackled, able
to speak to them through plexiglass. The visits lasted about
six hours. One day, Laura was also in the visiting
area to speak to a client and she caught a
glimpse of a man, Jamil.
Speaker 10 (38:26):
He smiled and waved when he saw me. I mean,
I don't think he knew who I was, but you know,
I sort of smiled and waved back. He if you're
not there officially to visit a particular person, you can't
(38:47):
have any communication with them. So there was no question that,
you know, like I could have gone over or spoken
to him or done anything like that. I mean, I
was worried that I would potentially get in trouble even
for doing the wave, But it just was a bright,
open smile that he gave me in a friendly wave,
(39:09):
and it just, I don't know, it was just nice
to see him.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
AmAm Jamil's body suffered because of conditions at the supermax.
Laura said that many people incarcerated there deal with high
blood pressure, vitamin D deficiencies, mobility issues, and they can
even lose their long distance vision because they so rarely
need to focus on anything far away. Laura worries about
(39:35):
all of that, but when I spoke to her, she
seemed more concerned about the psychological effects of being incarcerated
at ADX Florence. People with mental illness when they enter
the prison, they get sicker, some develop mental illness once
they get there. And then there are the people who
Laura can see are damaged but maybe not diagnosed. They
(39:56):
can't make eye contact or stay focused, and they're over
one or exhausted by conversations.
Speaker 10 (40:03):
I think there's something particularly insidious about solitary that, in
order to survive that, you're sort of trained to not
need social contact anymore and everything that comes with that,
And so if you sort of get good enough at it,
it then becomes hard to do it again when it's
(40:27):
not required. This idea that like you sort of go
from craving it to almost being sometimes unable to tolerate
it at.
Speaker 5 (40:35):
All and craving human contact.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, yeah, you've gone as far as using the word
torture to describe to practice. Is that something that you
still that you still believe?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Absolutely?
Speaker 10 (40:52):
I think when people think about torture, I think they
think about things that seem much more obvious in terms
of physical manifestations. So, you know, we don't sanction pulling
out people's fingernails, But the mental harm and anguish that
(41:17):
solitary confinement produces in people is just as real, and
almost to a person. The folks that I have talked
with who are in solitary would trade it in an
instant for whatever physical punishment the state would want to dispense.
(41:39):
Every one of them has talked about how much horse
this is.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
The federal courts haven't agreed with Laura that solitary confinement
and ad explorence is cruel and unusual punishment. The practice
continues today, mostly unabated. Talking to Laura and looking closely
at Adax, Florence, studying the concentrated isolating violence there, I
(42:09):
wonder if part of the reason that we citizens can
stomach the government carrying out violence on our behalf is
that we imagine that it stops with the person being punished,
like the harm to the deserving person is done and
there are no ripple effects. But this stuff, whether it's
Jimcrow sheriffs or FBI surveillance round from a semi automatic rifle,
(42:31):
or solitary confinement, it stays with a person etched as memory.
It stays within a family as loss. It stays within communities,
within societies, within countries, passed back and forth. If we
believe that they keep the public safe, we must harm
some people. Are we accounting for the ways that violence
begets more violence? All of this, I realize now was
(42:55):
roiling beneath the surface that night on March sixteenth, two thousand.
Some prisoners at ad Ex Florence have a path to
be transferred out to less harsh facilities, but it seemed
that because of man Jimil was technically a state prisoner,
that wasn't a possibility. He seemed to be trapped at
(43:15):
this prison at the end of the earth until his death,
unless maybe a new piece of evidence was found, something
that proved someone else shot the deputies.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
I've gotten away with murder for real.
Speaker 9 (43:32):
Yeah, some people say, man, you get away with murder.
Speaker 8 (43:34):
I've literally gotten away with murder.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
So yeah, I don't help all.
Speaker 8 (43:39):
The wood.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
That's on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a
production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical
(44:07):
was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey's Secret.
Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is our
associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coufman, Emily Martinez
and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch
and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by
(44:28):
Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed trem Ewen and Sheba Joseph.
Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes,
Destiny Dingle and Sabina Merra. The executive producers at Campside
Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher.
(44:53):
For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
The executive producer is That iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young,
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio or their employees.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Listening to Discretion is advised. Radical is released every Tuesday
and brought to you absolutely free, but if you want
to add free listening and early access to next week's episode,
subscribe to tenderfoot Plus. For more information, check out tenderfootplus
dot com.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Enjoy the episode Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
When European settlers arrived in the colonies in the seventeenth century,
they brought the death penalty with them. The first recorded
execution by Europeans was carried out in sixteen oh eight,
long before American independence and the ratification of the Constitution.
Crime subject to the death penalty have included murder, robbery, rape,
(01:09):
horse dealing, and aiding a runaway slave. For most of
the twentieth century, the state of Georgia electrocuted intimates to
death right up until the time of a mam Jamial's arrest, actually,
but the courts ruled that cruel and unusual, so when
a Maam Jamil's life was put in the hands of
twelve good folks from Georgia. He faced lethal injection that
(01:32):
was supposed to be more humane. A Mam Jamil's defense
team felt the pressure. Their arguments, the words they chose,
even their facial expressions. It could all affect the jury's opinion.
A mistake, a poor choice could lead to a mam
Jamial being sentenced to death and ultimately killed. A Mam
(01:53):
Jamial's defense attorney, Tony Axam.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I would be asking to save his life. So that's all.
That's a tremendous bird. You've said, jurors, he's not guilty.
There's not enough evidence, and now you have to come
in front of that same jury and say, okay, let's
(02:17):
assume you got it right. I have a second argument
for you. He should live.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
The prosecution was the first side to call witnesses. Deputy
Kinchin's mother took the stand. She said when she was
at home, she found herself sitting next to the phone
waiting for her son to call. Kinchin's sister said his
death left her depressed and angry. Kinchin's wife said he
had been a good father and that some days she
(02:47):
just sat and cried. The defense called witnesses in an
effort to show that a man Jimil and the decades
before the shooting, had lived a life of service. Andrew Young,
the former mayor of Atlanta and aid to doctor King,
he was a defense witness. Remember it was Young who,
nearly twenty years after this day in court, wrote a
(03:09):
letter to the Fulton County DA's office arguing that AmAm
Jamial was innocent. Young said that he and a Maam
Jamil or h. Rat Brown at the time, met briefly
in the sixties. They weren't close, but Young still knew
that Rapp had lived through Jim Crow worked in the
rural South, endured violence, and spent much of his life
(03:29):
as part of a movement pushing to improve the lives
of black people that counted for something. The way Young
saw it, Axem told me and Maam Jamil had built
up some credits going through all that credit to some
imaginary system weighing the value of human lives.
Speaker 5 (03:46):
So he should be spared.
Speaker 6 (03:50):
Now we're at two thousand and we still don't have freedom.
And that's the storm that Jamil Alamin weathered, and being
in that storm, he deserves to live even if you
think that he did it, spare his life, let him live.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
In their closing arguments, the prosecution to the murder was
especially vile and that it showed a Maam Jamil was depraved.
Prosecutors showed gruesome, bloody photos of Kinchin's wounds. They said
it mattered that it was a sheriff's deputy who was killed,
and by sentencing a Maam Jamil to die, the jury
would be signaling that violence against law enforcement won't be tolerated.
(04:33):
Jack Martin, in his closing argument, stressed the power that
society had put in the hands of the jury. What
is to be decided now, he said, is the most
important decision that any person ever makes in their whole life,
the most important decision that any democracy or any government
ever makes, the one time that we presume to be
god like. I appeal to your best, not your worst,
(04:57):
Martin said. I appeal to your hopes for the future,
not your fears. I appealed to the possibility and the
reality of redemption in all of us, not the brutal
satisfaction of revenge.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
Not the worst than us.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
AmAm Jamil didn't fear execution, and as the jury deliberated
on a sentence. He put everything in the hands of
a law. After five hours, the jury decided against the
death penalty and they sentenced a Mam Jamil to life
in prison without parole. From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and
(05:39):
iHeart Podcasts, This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode five,
Cherry Pie, AmAm Jamille h.
Speaker 5 (06:07):
Rat Brown.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
He had a gift for delivering unforgettable lines. But there's
one phrase that's stuck in our culture memory more than
any other. He said it in the speech in nineteen
sixty seven during the long hot Summer of Black Rebellion.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Violence is a plot of America's culture.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
It is as American as cherry pie.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Violence is as American as cherry pie. It's meant as
a statement of fact, one of those beautiful phrases that's
simple and profound. At the same time, Rap wasn't saying
that violence is inherently good. He was saying that violence
is America, and America is violence. America was founded with violence,
built with violence, and persists because of violence. Never mind
(06:52):
that Americans eat apple pie way more than cherry pie.
The slip better conjures up the red bloodiness of it all.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
I was still obsessed with getting to.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
The bottom of what happened on the ninth of March sixteenth,
two thousand. The evidence that came out at trial, it
was too shaky for me to set aside the possibility
that a Mamjimial was wrongfully convicted. But I was pulled
in another direction too. I needed to investigate this American violence,
how it operates, and the consequences, however dark or disguised
(07:24):
they might be. I since it was key to understanding
a Maamjamial and to understanding the eruption of violence in
the West End, whether a Mam Jamil was involved or not.
After AmAm Jamil was convicted and sentenced, law enforcement officials
held a secret meeting with the warden of Reidsville Prison
(07:45):
in Tattnall County, Georgia. A Maam Jamil was going to
be transferred there. Tattnall County's story is America's story crammed
into five hundred square miles of swamps and rolling hills
in southeastern Georgia. One point a quarter of the county's
population was enslaved raising beef, cattle, and cotton under the
Georgia sun and under the threat of death, rape, and
(08:08):
family separation. Much of Tattenneau County's success at the time,
according to an official county website, can be attributed to
slave labor.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Then the State of Georgia opened.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
A prison near the county seat, Readsville, and much of
the county's growth in the last thirty five years, again,
according to an official county website, can be attributed to
Regisville Prison. In that secret meeting, law enforcement officials told
the warden that thirty to fifty thousand people had vowed
(08:41):
to save a Maam Demial and to spirit him away
from the State of Georgia by force if necessary. Thirty
to fifty thousand people before law enforcement flew a Maamjamial
to Reedsville in a helicopter. They set up a five
mile perimeter around the prison. A Ma'am Tarak Khan was
the sole Muslim chape at the prison.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
When a Man Jamial arrived.
Speaker 7 (09:02):
They treated it like al chapo, right like that there
was gonna be you know, this army is going to
break him out of something, and the snipers and everybody
outside and trucks and this and that and bring him
in in a hui, you know, and all of that
kind of stuff, and uh, it wasn't none of that.
You know, they just overdo stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
A Mam Tarik had met a Man Jamil before on
the outside. They seen each other at basketball games, and
a Mam Tark went to the Western Mastet a couple
of times as a chaplain. He had seen guards abuse
inmates for basically no reason, and he worried they would
give a man Jamil an especially hard time. So after
the helicopter landed the Hueiye, he went to check on him.
Speaker 7 (09:47):
I wanted to stay there a little longer that day
to make sure that when hey body men, that he
didn't get scraped up, you know.
Speaker 8 (09:56):
What I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Reedsville was one of the state's highest security prisons. Politicians
called inmates there the worst of the worst. A Ma'am Jimil,
now nearly sixty years old, was held in a unit
named K Building and solitary Confinement. The doors to the
cells and K Building were solid metal, except for a
slot for a tray of food and a flap guards
(10:22):
would open to handcuff the inmates. A Maam Jamil's cell
was probably eight feet by ten feet, just enough room
for him to take three steps in either direction. He
was forced to spend twenty four hours a day inside
his cell, except for the occasions he was given an
hour to go outside to get some fresh air and
direct sunlight, but even then he was still inside a cage.
(10:46):
Our systems of public safety are built on the idea
that in order to protect the public, we must harm
some individuals. Punishment is a kind of harm, a kind
of violence. Often that as a society we have read
a person deserves because of the acts they committed. The
death penalty is an obvious example of violence if it's
(11:07):
squarely into the most common definition, the exercise of physical
force against another, and the practice of solitary confinement isn't
too far off. Most often, state violence is concealed by
bureaucracy and innocuous terms corrections, k building, even confinement.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
They were really stringent on him, thinking that he was
going to have control over people there, you know what
I mean. But you know, he had an even mindset
about him being in there. He wasn't panicking, you know,
he just this is where I'm at, you know, this
is the hand I'm in debt, So I'm here.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
A man Jamil was in solitary confinement, but he wasn't
completely isolated. He could see visitors, and he had them
almost every weekend in holiday. His wife Karima and their
son Kyrie came about three times a month. Sister Karima,
an attorney herself by this time, was working with a
legal team to appeal to Mam Jimil's conviction and the
(12:11):
Maam Jamil supporters. At least once a year, around Thanksgiving
and Christmas, they gathered outside the prison to protest his
conviction and his treatment inside. A Maam Jamil communicated with
the other inmates in K Building by talking through air
ducts between the cells. A Maam Tarak told us that
AmAm Jamil gave the Shahada, the Muslim oath to a
(12:32):
white supremacist and K Building that he converted the guy
to Alam. A tale, maybe a true one from the
legend of AmAm Jamil. A Ma'am Tark. He visited a
K Building pretty regularly.
Speaker 7 (12:48):
It wasn't necessarily a special trip for him per se.
But I've made short of when I went over there
that I got a chance to talk with him. I
called officer officer to dropped slot. There's a little slot
there and they would drop the slot. So I don't
have to talk in the crack of the door. But
you know, I used to talk to him periodically, you
(13:09):
know what I mean. And he always had good spirits.
You know what I mean. He's locked up, don't have anything,
and then ask you is anything I could do for
you? You know what you need anything? I mean, that's his
first words, you know, I mean, you locked up?
Speaker 5 (13:20):
What you got?
Speaker 7 (13:21):
You know what I'm saying. So, but that's how he was.
He always did that. Even if you see him now,
he'll say the same thing.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I know from court documents that when a Mamjamil arrived
at regivial prison, the warden was immediately suspicious and wary
of him. Mam Jamil was accused at least three times
of being involved in escape plots. I'm talking Shawshank redemption
type stuff here. One time he was allegedly caught hanging
out near a broken window on the other side of
the glass, a rope made of sheets and a hacksaw.
(13:52):
He denied all of it, but the possibility of mam
Jamil's escape that was just the beginning of the warden's concerns.
In a memo from July two thousand and two, months
after a Maam Jamil was convicted. The warden said that
AmAm Jamil had the potential and influence to be a
definite threat. This at the same time, he said that
(14:14):
AmAm Jamil hadn't created any trouble, that his behavior was acceptable,
and that the warden expected his behavior would continue to be.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Acceptable to me.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
This contradiction that a Maam Jamil was a threat but
also well behaved the warden was revealing a deeper fear,
something like the evil energy that the US Marshall felt
in that Alabama courtroom standing near him. The myth of
a man Jamil. It was spreading out of a man
Jamil's control and gaining traction among people with the power
(14:48):
to punish. In two thousand and five, after three years
of prison time, a Muslim inmate and a different facility
is in a Mam Jamila message. The other guy wanted
to know if a Mam Jamil would assume leadership over Muslims.
(15:09):
Throughout the Georgia Department of Corrections, unifying Muslim inmates at
over fifty prisons, a Ma'am Jamil said yes. A document
was circulated for other Muslim inmates to sign if they
agreed to pledge baya or loyalty to a man Jamil.
The mission as it's laid out in the copy of
the document we have seemed noble enough. It said, Look,
(15:32):
Muslims aren't treated well in Georgia prisons. If we come
together under a Mam Jamil, we can better advocate for
ourselves and that will ultimately help us be better Muslims.
But a Ma'am Tarik he didn't think this was a
good idea, even though he had a lot of respect
for a Maam Jamil.
Speaker 7 (15:51):
I think a few brothers told me about it, and
they would ask me about it, and I told him, no,
that's not gonna happen, because that would even that at
that particular time, would trump the other authority that is there.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
The wardens ran the prisons period, and they would shut
down any other parallel hierarchy. When prison administration learned of
the BAI, they talked to a Maam Jimial about it
and he said he would instruct the other Muslims to
quash the effort. That would be the end of that.
But in June of two thousand and six, about six
(16:30):
months after the BAI began, the FBI published an internal
report with the title the attempt to radicalize the Georgia
Department of Corrections inmate population. The report called AmAm Jimil
an Islamic extremist.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Basically a terrorist.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
It ran through his biography, even quoted his fiery speech in.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Cambridge, Maryland.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The FBI report narrowed in on a few lines in
the BAI document, and maybe reasonably so. One of the
lines said the Georgia Department of Corrections is a battlefield
and we need a general to coordinate and direct us,
and another a quote from an Islamic text. It suggested
violence against anyone who challenges the leader. Here's this idea again.
(17:17):
Violence is a means for the greater good. It's scary
for authorities when they're facing it too. It's why so
much of the response from the FEDS was based on
what they thought a man Jamil might do or how
they imagine others might respond to him.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Not what actually happened.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
One passage of the report reads, it should be noted
that any statements made by Alamine could be taken in
an extreme nature, and the content could be potentially dangerous,
even if Alamine's intent was innocuous and Mama Jamil became
bigger than he actually was, scarier than he actually was,
because the fear of violence freaks you the fuck out.
(17:57):
One morning in two thousand and seven, prison guards showed
up at a mamm Jimial cell and k building. They
took him out through the rear gate of the prison,
where there was a caravan waiting. The guards put him
in the back of an suv. We got you now
that Mam Jamil, said, one of the guards told him.
Then they drove off. In the most common definition of violence,
(18:39):
like I mentioned a few minutes ago, the word simply
means to exercise physical force against another. But there are
also meetings of violence, obsolete uses dating back to the
fifteenth century that define it as an abuse of power
or authority that persecutes or oppresses. These days, we don't
really call that violence. No blood, no visible injury, But
(19:03):
the consequences of such violence that we don't really call violence,
they're very real, tangible. The FBI surveillance of a Mamjmial
the infiltration of the mass JD by informants, it could
fall under this lesser used definition of violence, And the
more I learned about the extent and duration of the
surveillance the more I was convinced that it contributed to
(19:25):
the shootout where there was very real blood a Ma'am
Jamil's wife, Karima Elamine, she got information from the FBI
that helped me draw this conclusion. Sister Karima is a lawyer,
one I'm acquainted with. Actually, she represented me and my
(19:45):
wife on our green card application. Embarrassingly enough, I didn't
realize at the time who her husband was. We reconnected
when I started working on this project, and she was
as nice as ever, though she did tell me that
my generation needs to know more of its history. Sister
Kareema is pretty private and she didn't want to be interviewed,
but we were able to find a recording of her
(20:07):
from a rally to support AmAm Jamil that happened in Harlem.
Speaker 8 (20:16):
He struggle.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Rallies for a man Jamil weren't uncommon after he was
convicted and placed in isolation. This is one of the
larger ones we've come across. There were about two hundred
people there. Here's sister Kareema.
Speaker 9 (20:31):
I do want to extend email Jamil and I do
call him Emaim Jamil. I want to extend his greetings
and his appreciation and he would say, I Salamu a
leako to everyone, and that's how I begin, and I
begin in the name of Allah the most Merciful.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Soon after she and Rap began their relationship, the FBI
contacted her sister.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
Karama's family were part of a.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Black power group and they had been arrested. The FBI
tried to make a deal with Kareema.
Speaker 9 (21:07):
They wanted me to tell them where my husband might
soon to be husband, where he was traveling. And they
told me at that time, well, if you help us,
will drop the chargees against your sister and her husband.
And I said, well, you know they were frayed, so
I'm not even going to go there. I'm not going
(21:29):
to cooperate. Five years later, my husband is still saying
he could never figure out whether I had cooperated or not.
He's still telling me that, right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's sort of a dark joke, but also an ugly
thing to have between a couple. Sister Karma said that
when Rapp was a target of the FBI, the bureau
harassed both of their parents so intensely that her father
dropped dead in the street after some officials visited him
in his job. A month later, a Mamjimialsma died and
four months after that, Sister Karima's mother died. And let's
(22:05):
not forget the car bomb.
Speaker 9 (22:09):
It brought out a family closer and closer to him.
Why they demonstrated the extent and the degree that they
will go to divide family.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
After a Mam Jamil was convicted, Sister Karma filed a
Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI. It told
her that they had twenty one thousand, six hundred and
forty nine pages of records potentially responsive to her request.
Twenty one thousand, six hundred and forty nine. Maybe at
one point there had been even more records on a
Mam Jamil, but the FBI said many were damaged in
(22:46):
a flood.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Two years later, after Sister Karma submitted their request, the
FBI turned over almost seven hundred pages.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
When I look through the.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Documents, there were two things I saw that suggest the
FBI was at least linked to the shooting of Deputy
Kinchin and Deputy English. I don't mean they somehow orchestrated
the thing. What I mean is that the FBI, they
were up in the mix. First, there were three handwritten words.
(23:18):
It was placed remember how when a Mam Jmial was
captured in Lowndes County, Alabama, an FBI agent named Ron
Campbell and kicked and spit on him. Campbell had a
troubled history with the Bureau. Was accused of shooting an
African American Muslim in the back of the head and
planting a gun at the scene in Philadelphia. While Campbell
(23:38):
was chasing a Mam Demial, he fell in the swamp,
he'd say later, and was on his own for at
least a few minutes. During the trial, the defense called
Campbell to testify. Here's a ma'am Jamil's lead defense attorney,
Jack Martin.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
We knew that Campbell was willing to plant out as
he was a corrupt FBI agent. The gun was not
on at the time he was arrested. It was supposedly
found later, and they found the gun on the ground.
I wonder why they didn't find the grun in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I said this earlier, but I'll say it again. We
contacted Campbell, but he didn't agree to an interview. An
internal investigation cleared Campbell in that Philadelphia case and he
was never charged with anything related to it. And we
don't have any evidence Campbell was a corrupt agent. That's
just what Martin thought. After a man Jimial was captured
(24:31):
that same night, a sergeant on the dog tracking team
found a nine millimeter pistol near the edge of the woods.
Speaker 8 (24:40):
Why would ala mean if you had this shootout in
the lad with his gun, had brought it with him
to Alabama, why wouldn't he just.
Speaker 5 (24:47):
Get rid of it?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
The document's sister Karima got from the FBI. They included
handwritten notes of a debrief with the sergeant on the
dog tracking team, and the notes from the FBI said,
apparently paraphrasing the sergeant about the gun, that it was
placed like maybe the sergeant told the FBI that it
looked like the pistol had been planted. That one handwritten
(25:12):
note it supported the argument that the FBI conspired to
get a mam Jamil convicted. We tried to ask the
sergeant about this, but he didn't agree to an interview.
Law enforcement found another gun in the woods too, a
Ruger Many fourteen rifle. Like with the pistol of mam
Jamial's fingerprints weren't found on the rifle. Both guns were
(25:34):
ultimately linked to a mam Jamil in the shooting.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
But you know, like I've.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Said before, ballistics analysis linking a specific gun to a
specific bullet, it has no basis in science. But if
the guns were placed, were they identical models that law
enforcement could have gotten anywhere? Were they brought all the
way from Georgia. Attorney Martin has a theory for that.
Speaker 8 (25:57):
It only would be plausible if some ount know of it.
The undercover agent for the FBI, whoever collected the gun
in Atlanta or got a gun that matched the situation
and brought it to Alabama.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Basically, Martin is saying someone somehow connected to the FBI
who was in and around the mass Jed at the
time of the shooting, they helped execute a frame job.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
And so that brings me.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
To the second thing in the documents that sister Karima
got from the FBI proof the bureau was surveiling a
Mamjamial just days before the shootout on March sixteenth, two thousand.
The documents are heavily redacted, but I can see that
they include regular reports and surveillance of a mam Jamial
and the mass Jed, and the surveillance actually appeared to
escalate in the months before the shootout.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
Let me start at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
March nineteen ninety eight, during two hours of surveillance, the subject,
a Maam Jamil, was not observed. April ninety eight, agents
drove through the West End and saw a Mam Jmil
standing on the deck behind his corner store across from
the mass Gen. February nineteen ninety nine, a confidential source
(27:14):
told someone at the FBI a piece of information significant
enough that it was shared with FBI headquarters, and the
surveillance appeared to intensify. April ninety nine, an agent saw
a Mam Jamil unload something from a dark green Ford
Explorer with and this is noted in the report dealer tags.
(27:36):
The next month, a mam Jamil was pulled over in
that Ford Explorer because he was driving with dealer tags,
and then arrested for allegedly driving a stolen vehicle. Then
there were FBI reports in May, June, July, and August
of ninety nine, all redacted. In October there's another long report.
(27:58):
It describes a Mamgmil as the leader of a network
of masters in the US that are quote involved in
violent crimes and gained their funding from countries in opposition
to the philosophical.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
Standing of the United States.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Alamin is well known to law enforcement authorities as an
active militant.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
End quote the.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Philosophical standing of the United States. That sounds to me
like something you'd expect to find in a coin tell
pro document from the sixties. In February two thousand, the
FBI got an updated driver's license vhoto of a mamm
Jimil from the Georgia State Patrol and on March sixth
of two thousand, just ten days before the shootout, there's
(28:40):
a memo with a section at the bottom reporting a
mam Jmial was charged with failing to appear in court
on that stolen vehicle charge. It was his failure to
appear that led to the warrant that Kentin and English
had with them in the West End on March sixteenth.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
Two thousand.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Despite all their redactions in the documents, they said a
lot the FBI could have done work behind the scenes
to get a mam Jamil arrested in that Ford Explorer.
They could have had someone running surveillance in the West
End at the time of the shootout, someone who might
have helped plan a weapon in the woods. That all
seemed possible to me. Some of it even seemed likely.
(29:22):
Now I knew that the FBI is pursued of a
man Jamil of h rap Brown, what we can call
a kind of violence against him and his family and
his community.
Speaker 5 (29:32):
It hadn't stopped at the end of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It didn't even stop once he was convicted and placed
in solitary confinement in Georgia. Because the FBI's reported about
a Mamjmial while he was in prison, the one that
labeled him an Islamic extremist. That report helped justify even
more violence, violence that some might call.
Speaker 5 (29:55):
Soul crushing.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
In two thousand and seven, five years after he was convicted,
when a Ma'am Jamil was taken out of his cell
in the early morning, put in the back of an
suv and driven away from Reedsville Prison in Tattnall County, Georgia.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
He had no idea where he.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Was being taken. We got you now, he said.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
A guard told.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Him, I wonder where a Maam Jamil thought he might
be going when he heard that. It's not something an
iniminate here. As before being taken to a medical appointment
or a court date. Now this was much more ominous.
It had to be worse than solitary confinement in Georgia's
toughest prison, where Ma'am Jamil had already been. Did his
(30:53):
mind turn to the car bomb? Did he think about
waterboarding Guantanamo? Or did he trust his government to follow
the rule of law?
Speaker 5 (31:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
An airport about a three hour drive away from Reedsville
was their first stop. A Mam Jamil sat waiting for
several more hours in the back seat of a van,
his feet shackled, his hands cuffed and chained to his waist.
By this time, a Maam Jamil had picked up that
the Feds had him, but he still didn't know where
he was going. At five in the evening, now ten
(31:29):
hours after he was taken out of his cell, he
complained he was having chest pains and needed to see
a doctor. When he got out of the vehicle, he collapsed,
and after some back and forth among the guards, he
was taken to a hospital. There was an issue with
his heart. It's not clear exactly what it was, but
he underwent a procedure under anesthesia. Two days later, a
(31:52):
Maam Jamil was finally taken onto a plane and flown
to Oklahoma and then to Colorado. He was driven west
through the desert.
Speaker 10 (32:02):
There's mountains around it. The area itself is beautiful, but
it becomes more and more remote until finally you get
to this place that feels a little bit like the
end of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Laura Rovner is an attorney and one of the few
people who has spent time inside the federal prison where
Maam Jamil was taken in Florence, Colorado. The place's full
name is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, but it's
known as ADX Florence, a supermax prison considered the most
secure in the world. The Georgia Department of Corrections had
(32:37):
requested that the federal government take custody of a. Maam Jamil,
citing the FBI's finding that he was an Islamic extremist.
Laura the attorney. She teaches law at the University of Denver,
where she runs a civil rights clinic. She took on
her first client from ADX Florence in two thousand and six,
suing the government over the conditions there.
Speaker 10 (32:58):
With her students help, and then the students and I
went on to represent a number of other people. And
then the more work that I did, the more it
became apparent how necessary it was and how really unspeakably
bad the conditions were.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
About three hundred Americans and foreign citizens are incarcerated at
ADX Florence. Joaquin al Chapo Gusman, the former drug lord
from Mexico known for his brazen prison escapes, one of
the Boston Marathon bombers, men involved in the bombing of
the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety three, and at
least nine members of al Qaeda. Those are just some
(33:38):
of the most famous in the federal system. After nine
to eleven, a disproportionate percentage of Muslims, by one estimate,
seventy percent were incarcerated at high security prisons.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
The federal government.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Opened EIGHTYX Florence in nineteen ninety four. Laura told me
that as the prison population in the United States grew
dramatically during the eighties and nineties, prisons, as you might expect,
became overcrowded, sentences were longer, inmates grew more hopeless, and
they became more violent. The idea behind opening the supermax
(34:15):
facility was to isolate potentially violent inmates ad X Florence
looks like a one or two story red brick building
that's built into the side of a hill. It's sort
of unassuming on the outside except for the circles of
barbed wire and the watchtower. When AmAm Jamil first arrived there,
(34:35):
he might have felt like he was being taken underground,
and it probably would have felt disorienting. There are a
few windows and little or no natural light.
Speaker 10 (34:46):
In terms of what people's experiences like, kind of on
the way they are entering it, I think people are
are generally afraid, not knowing what to expect, not knowing
if they're going to be there forever or if they're
going to have any ability to get out eventually.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
A mam Jamil would have been taken to his own cell.
Everyone in ADX is in solitary confinement. The atmosphere is clinical, cold, austere,
the way a mam Jamil put it. If Reidsville Prison
was run by the KKK, ADIAX Florence is run by Nazis.
He had been in solitary confinement in Reidsville Prison too,
(35:29):
but the conditions at ADAX Florence they were more profoundly isolating.
The prison seems designed to sever a person's access to
an influence on society. If part of what we humans
are doing as conscious beings on this earth is acting
on impulses from somewhere deep down to shape the world
around us. Adix Florence walls off those deeper portions the
(35:52):
souls of people. The religious might say, with thick, thick concrete,
some souls are just too dangerous. Each individual cell is
(36:12):
eight feet by ten feet, about three steps to get
from one side to the other. The walls are white
or grayish green. There's a cement platform bed, a shower,
a cement desk, a port cement stool in front of
the desk, and a TV. The cells have solid doors
that limit communication with anyone outside. Five days a week,
(36:36):
a Mammed Demal was able to spend an hour outdoors.
He was taken fully shackled to what Laura describes as
an empty swimming pool with cages dropped in it. The
view from inside the cages more concrete. A Mammed de
Meal could see the sky, maybe a plane flying overhead,
but nothing of the landscape, not even the mountains he
would have passed when he was transported to the prison.
Speaker 10 (37:01):
There are people who have talked about going out to
those exercise cages and you know that somehow, there some
miracle of nature, some little blade of grass was growing
up under the cement, and you know, some of the
people who were in the cages at different times were
able to see it, and we're just so excited by
it because it was the only nature that they had seen.
(37:21):
I mean, you don't see anything out your window except cement. Also,
and you know, talked about the cruelty of one of
the staff coming and just pulling out this, you know,
one little blade of grass, and it's just so incredibly
evocative and symbolic to me of what the space is like.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
AmAm Jamil can make two or three fifteen minute calls
each month. Sister Karma and their youngest son, Kyrie, they
came to visit him much less frequently in Colorado than
they had in Georgia. Reidsville Prison is two hundred miles
from Atlanta. Eighty X Florence is fourteen hundred. On the
days that sister Karima and Kyrie did come to ADX Florence,
(38:07):
a Mam Jamil was taken to the visiting area and
he sat across from them, still handcuffed and shackled, able
to speak to them through plexiglass. The visits lasted about
six hours. One day, Laura was also in the visiting
area to speak to a client and she caught a
glimpse of a man, Jamil.
Speaker 10 (38:26):
He smiled and waved when he saw me. I mean,
I don't think he knew who I was, but you know,
I sort of smiled and waved back. He if you're
not there officially to visit a particular person, you can't
(38:47):
have any communication with them. So there was no question that,
you know, like I could have gone over or spoken
to him or done anything like that. I mean, I
was worried that I would potentially get in trouble even
for doing the wave, But it just was a bright,
open smile that he gave me in a friendly wave,
(39:09):
and it just, I don't know, it was just nice
to see him.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
AmAm Jamil's body suffered because of conditions at the supermax.
Laura said that many people incarcerated there deal with high
blood pressure, vitamin D deficiencies, mobility issues, and they can
even lose their long distance vision because they so rarely
need to focus on anything far away. Laura worries about
(39:35):
all of that, but when I spoke to her, she
seemed more concerned about the psychological effects of being incarcerated
at ADX Florence. People with mental illness when they enter
the prison, they get sicker, some develop mental illness once
they get there. And then there are the people who
Laura can see are damaged but maybe not diagnosed. They
(39:56):
can't make eye contact or stay focused, and they're over
one or exhausted by conversations.
Speaker 10 (40:03):
I think there's something particularly insidious about solitary that, in
order to survive that, you're sort of trained to not
need social contact anymore and everything that comes with that,
And so if you sort of get good enough at it,
it then becomes hard to do it again when it's
(40:27):
not required. This idea that like you sort of go
from craving it to almost being sometimes unable to tolerate
it at.
Speaker 5 (40:35):
All and craving human contact.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, yeah, you've gone as far as using the word
torture to describe to practice. Is that something that you
still that you still believe?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Absolutely?
Speaker 10 (40:52):
I think when people think about torture, I think they
think about things that seem much more obvious in terms
of physical manifestations. So, you know, we don't sanction pulling
out people's fingernails, But the mental harm and anguish that
(41:17):
solitary confinement produces in people is just as real, and
almost to a person. The folks that I have talked
with who are in solitary would trade it in an
instant for whatever physical punishment the state would want to dispense.
(41:39):
Every one of them has talked about how much horse
this is.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
The federal courts haven't agreed with Laura that solitary confinement
and ad explorence is cruel and unusual punishment. The practice
continues today, mostly unabated. Talking to Laura and looking closely
at Adax, Florence, studying the concentrated isolating violence there, I
(42:09):
wonder if part of the reason that we citizens can
stomach the government carrying out violence on our behalf is
that we imagine that it stops with the person being punished,
like the harm to the deserving person is done and
there are no ripple effects. But this stuff, whether it's
Jimcrow sheriffs or FBI surveillance round from a semi automatic rifle,
(42:31):
or solitary confinement, it stays with a person etched as memory.
It stays within a family as loss. It stays within communities,
within societies, within countries, passed back and forth. If we
believe that they keep the public safe, we must harm
some people. Are we accounting for the ways that violence
begets more violence? All of this, I realize now was
(42:55):
roiling beneath the surface that night on March sixteenth, two thousand.
Some prisoners at ad Ex Florence have a path to
be transferred out to less harsh facilities, but it seemed
that because of man Jimil was technically a state prisoner,
that wasn't a possibility. He seemed to be trapped at
(43:15):
this prison at the end of the earth until his death,
unless maybe a new piece of evidence was found, something
that proved someone else shot the deputies.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
I've gotten away with murder for real.
Speaker 9 (43:32):
Yeah, some people say, man, you get away with murder.
Speaker 8 (43:34):
I've literally gotten away with murder.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
So yeah, I don't help all.
Speaker 8 (43:39):
The wood.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
That's on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a
production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical
(44:07):
was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey's Secret.
Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is our
associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coufman, Emily Martinez
and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch
and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by
(44:28):
Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed trem Ewen and Sheba Joseph.
Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes,
Destiny Dingle and Sabina Merra. The executive producers at Campside
Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher.
(44:53):
For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
The executive producer is That iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young,
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