2582. Remembering Lynne Stewart

Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action, March 7, 2017

Lynne Stewart with her husband Ralph Pointer. Photo: Louis Lanzano/AP.

A few minutes ago my dear friend and comrade Ralph Poynter called to say that his lifelong companion, Lynne Stewart, passed away. She was 77, of Irish origin, and a born fighter who unswervingly devoted herself to humanity’s cause.

Just a few weeks earlier Lynne pledged to meet me in NY in a couple of months, over dinner to be sure, when we would dance once again to demonstrate that her life still had some time to go …  and for joy.

A few years earlier, when prospects looked bleak to win her freedom based on “compassionate release,” Lynne insisted that she would prevail and that she would celebrate with us in San Francisco to the tunes of a brass band. Sure enough, a brass band did appear at Lynne’s welcome home San Francisco rally, and she and Ralph, surrounded by her loving friends, danced in the streets at 15th and Valencia. It was a victory well worth the effort, allowing Lynne a couple of more years to fight on against all that is evil in this barbarous capitalist world, and to smile at every inch we collectively gained as we fought back.  

Lynne was always surrounded by family and loved ones, with children from her first marriage, and Ralph’s too, as well kids together, and grandkids—all filled with admiration for Grandma Lynne—all the recipient of Lynne’s warmth, dedication, mindfulness and love.

Lynne was fond of saying, including to The New York Times reporter who interviewed her at her home a few weeks before her death, that she had no intention of leaving this earth quietly. Quoting Dillon Thomas she told The Times, whose reporter followed the next day with a contemptuous hate piece  recounting his corporate master’s ire for everything wonderful in Lynne life and struggles, that she had no intention of “going gently into that good night.”

That was Lynne’s credo, her detractors notwithstanding. Always the poet’s words in mind, Lynne insisted:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Funds are urgently needed to cover final family expenses. Give generously comrades and friends. We are honoring Lynne’s gift to us all and to all who rage against injustice everywhere.

 Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY 11216. 1st floor. (Make checks payable to Lynne Stewart Org.)

*****

By Jeff Mackler, March 6, 2017

This morning I spoke with Lynne Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, at their home in Brooklyn, N.Y. We managed to do the call via video camera, where Ralph and the family were surrounding Lynne, who had just had a second series of mini-strokes that rendered her unable to speak but able to hear what were perhaps my last words of love and solidarity. Lynne opened her eyes in acknowledgment, bravely trying to muster a smile.

Lynne’s cancer has now spread throughout her body, including her brain. Ralph explained that her days are numbered and she is unlikely to make it to her next scheduled medical appointment on March 16.

Lynne and I go back some 63 years, to 1954-58 when we were students at Jamaica High School in Queens, N.Y. We relished singing the Jamaica High School song together at many a solidarity meeting. Decades later, we taught school in NYC, and were union activists in the late 1960s, when we opposed the 1968 racist school strike led by the AFT’s reactionary leader, Albert Shanker. In those days, young Lynne, now 77, was often seen unconventionally riding on the back of Ralph’s motorcycle, on her way to this or that protest.

Another several decades later, when Lynne faced frame-up charges of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism stemming from her issuing a press release on behalf of her client, the famous blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rachman, we engaged once again to try to win her freedom. After a long legal battle, when I headed Lynne’s defense committee on the West Coast, Lynne was cruelly sentenced to 10 years in a Texas prison, after vindictive federal prosecutors appealed a federal court judge’s sentence of some 18 months.

After she had served three years in prison, we mounted a campaign that won the support of 70,000 social activists across the country. Lynne, cancer ridden, was finally granted “compassionate release” following her prison doctors’ diagnosis that she had less then a year to live. Lynne beat the odds and spent almost three years in freedom, continuing her lifelong commitment to defending all those victims of capitalist injustice.

Lynne was among [unjustly imprisoned political activist and writer] Mumia Abu-Jamal’s most ardent supporters. Lynne’s court cases included some of the seminal Weatherman cases in the 1970s as well as an amazing victory on behalf of Larry Davis, who defended himself against a multiple cop shooting invasion of his house, where a number of the shoot-first police were killed.

Pilloried by the corporate media, who mocked her every success in the rigged criminal “justice” system, Lynne never bent to her accusers’ contempt for an attorney for those on the other side of the class line, as Lynne aptly described it, no matter how unpopular her client.

Lynne’s life was one of dedication to all the people’s causes. I valued her friendship, her humor, her sparkle, and her hatred for all that is evil and yet love for all that is beautiful. Only Lynne began or ended her speeches by reading from one of the world’s great poets, whose universal appeal to what is best in all of us, rang true.

No doubt we will remember Lynne well when we in the Bay Area plan to memorialize her lifelong achievements. Meanwhile, her family is in dire need of financial support as these last days painfully proceed and the months before. Here’s an appeal by Ralph and the family’s long-term friend, Betty Davis.

Please send your generous contribution as per the information below.

In solidarity and with the greatest admiration for a comrade and friend whose life set the bar high for all of us who cherish human freedom and dignity.

Jeff Mackler is the past West Coast coordinator of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee and director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

2581. Lynne Stewart: People's Attorney and Former Political Prisoner Dies at 77

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, March 8, 2017

Lynn Stewart on civil liberties (2002)

Radical civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart died Tuesday at her home in Brooklyn from complications of cancer and a recent series of strokes. She was 77 years old.

A former teacher and librarian, Stewart was known as a people’s lawyer who represented the poor and revolutionaries. Many considered her a political prisoner herself when she was given a 10-year sentence for distributing press releases on behalf of one of her clients, Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric known as the "blind Sheikh," who was convicted of conspiring to blow up the United Nations and other New York City landmarks.

Democracy Now! first interviewed Stewart about the case in 2002.

We were also at the courthouse in 2006 when Stewart was first sentenced.

In 2009, Stewart spoke to Democracy Now! in her last broadcast interview before beginning her prison sentence, explaining the background to the case and why she had been charged.

“We found out later that the Clinton administration, under Janet Reno, had the option to prosecute me, and they declined to do so, based on the notion that without lawyers like me or the late Bill Kunstler or many that I could name, the cause of justice is not well served. They need the gadflies.
So, at any rate, they made me sign onto the agreement again not to do this. They did not stop me from representing him. I continued to represent him.
And it was only after 9/11, in April of 2002, that John Ashcroft came to New York, announced the indictment of me, my paralegal and the interpreter for the case, on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization. One of the footnotes to the case, of course, is that Ashcroft also appeared on nationwide television with Letterman that night ballyhooing the great work of Bush’s Justice Department in indicting.

In 2010, Stewart was re-sentenced to a 10-year term, nearly five times her original sentence, after an appeals court ruled her original punishment was too light.

Attorney Leonard Weinglass said Stewart’s sentence would "mark this era as the era of the war on terrorists, which includes the war on lawyers who defend those who are accused of terrorism. To put her behind bars when no one was injured, no one was harmed, when those who produced the torture memos, those who produced the war are going free and even prospering is really the irony of our time."

While held in federal prison for nearly four years, Stewart suffered from stage IV breast cancer that metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones, and lungs. She was given 18 months to live.

Calls to grant her compassionate release came at a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons faced increasing criticism for refusing to release terminally ill prisoners. In 2013, we spoke to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Democracy Now! producer Renée Feltz, who went to Texas to interview Lynne Stewart in federal prison, the first face-to-face interview granted to a reporter.

We also interviewed Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, and her daughter, Dr. Zenobia Brown, who is a hospice and palliative care specialist with a master’s in public health. Poynter cleared up a common misconception about Stewart’s comments after her original sentencing.

RALPH POYNTER: What she had said, "As many of my clients have said to me when they received a sentence that was less than possible—possibly expected, 'I can do that standing on my head.'" Now that’s a big difference than saying, "I can do that standing on my head." And if you go back and review the tapes, it is very clear what she said. And she began by thanking the judge. And all of this has been skipped by the media, who has lied about what Lynne said.

After months of campaigning, a judge granted Stewart’s release, and on New Year’s Day, 2014, Democracy Now! was at the airport when she triumphantly returned to New York, and was met by her family and friends.

CROWD: We love Lynne! We love Lynne!
AMY GOODMAN: Lynne, how do you feel?
LYNNE STEWART: Beyond joy. Beyond joy.
AMY GOODMAN: Lynne, did you think this day would come?
LYNNE STEWART: Well, somehow or other, yes, but not as wonderful as it has come—
AMY GOODMAN: And how are you—
LYNNE STEWART: —or as suddenly. It’s like bursting on me, you know? I mean, yesterday at this time, I was deep in the dungeons, and here I am in my beloved New York. It’s just wonderful. I can’t tell you.

Watch all of our interviews with Lynne Stewart.