Transcription of Mr. James Lohman - page one of five

Date: February 24, 2009

Place: Austin, Texas

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder; Sennheiser external microphone

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV cassettes

Interviewer: Sabina Hinz-Foley

Videographer: Mark Evans

Transcription: Nancy Semin-Lingo

Reviewed & edited: Kimberly Bacon

Redacted: Virginia Raymond

Background of James Lohman

HINZ-FOLEY: Would you like to tell us a little bit about your childhood, where you came from, where you were born?

MR. JAMES LOHMAN: Sure. I was born in December 1951, in New York City and I spent the first nineteen years of my life in New York City and the immediate surrounding areas. I would say that I grew up in a sort of liberal Jewish northeastern family, where my parents were A.C.L.U. members and I sort of got as my starting point, philosophically and politically, was a fairly liberal perspective. I went to a high school that was very much encouraged political activism, and community involvement, and so I was always politically active and interested in social issues.

I would say that in the late sixties, during the Vietnam era, I graduated high school in 1969, so that was the height of the Vietnam War, and I went to Columbia University, where the year before I went they had pretty much come close to burning down the whole university, so there was still a lot of sort of smoldering political activism on campus at that time, although it was a little over the peak at that point. And then, I dropped out of college in 1971, and just sort of went on this odyssey to find other things. And I went back to school, except for one semester in seventy-three, back to Columbia, and then I dropped out again.

And I ended up in north Florida, in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1974, and around 1976 or so I decided that I had gotten very interested in prisons as a humans rights issue and went back to school at Florida State University where they have a major criminology program. I got my undergraduate degree in criminology. I did some studies during my undergraduate degree of prison conditions and when I was lucky enough in my last year or so there to become involved with a thing called the Center for Participant Education at Florida State, which was a free university, where we were offered— anyone could teach a class to the community, anyone who had a skill or interest could teach any class they wanted to.

And so we had about a hundred classes per semester that were offered to the community, no charge and we also would put on a film series and bring in guest speakers about international issues and domestic/political issues and social issues, and so my last year in school I was the director of that program, and that was a great experience of also being involved in all sorts of issues: Central America, poverty issues in the United States.

Activism against the death penalty

MR. JAMES LOHMAN: And so when I got my degree, almost immediately when I graduated, I was approached by a remarkable person named Scharlette Holderman, who was probably the mother of mitigation and death penalty work. She has trained hundreds people in how to interview family members and develop mitigation and psychological issues. She, at that time, was the director of a small nonprofit in Tallahassee called the Florida Clearinghouse in Criminal Justice, and there has actually been quite a bit of stuff written about that organization.

There is a whole book about it really called, Among the Lowest of the Dead, I don’t know if you’ve seen that book, by David von Drehle, he is a Washington Post writer. He wrote a book, pretty much about that office. Half of the book is really about that office, and Scharlette’s work.

So Scharlette asked me if I would come and work with her. So that was in May of 1979, I went to go work with her there, and that happened to the month of the first execution in Florida. And she was pretty sure that was going to be an execution that month. I went to work on May first, and I sat down with her and she said, “We’re going to probably have an execution in a few weeks. Organize a protest.” And so that was my first assignment, really.

And we did in fact have an execution May 25, 1979. It was the first execution in Florida since the death penalty came back, and it was the first non-volunteer execution in the United States. There had been two executions before that in the entire country, both of whom had given up their appeals. So this was the first guy actually fighting his execution to be executed. His name was John Spenkelink, and it was a very famous case at the time.

I should also mention that a couple of years before that, I had gotten involved in the death penalty issue in probably 1976 or so when I was an undergraduate. The United States Supreme Court of 1976 approved Florida’s death penalty.

They approved it in several states, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and right around that time, there was some discussion about the fact that the death penalty was back and I noticed a poster on campus saying, “Meeting of Tallahassee citizens against the death penalty.”

So I started going to those meetings in about 1976 or so, which was basically the beginnings of trying to organize against the death penalty down in Florida.

So in seventy-nine, we geared up for this execution. We had some massive protests at the state capitol around his execution. And actually that execution became a symbol for the national anti-death penalty movement because he was the first person to fight his execution. He was executed and Bob Graham, who is actually a fairly progressive governor and senator, was the governor at the time, but because he had maintained this very mechanistic, robotic approach towards executing this guy, he became a symbol of the death penalty nationally. And for several years, death penalty activities around the United States targeted Bob Graham as a symbol for pro-death penalty.

In retrospect, it turns out he was actually relatively moderate on the death penalty. He actually granted six commutations while he was governor. Since then, not one has been granted in Florida. So it is kind of ironic that he was set up as this sort of villainous pro-death penalty person, and in actuality, he was actually relatively— he never took any— he always said, “I don’t take any pleasure in carrying these out. This is my job,” etcetera and so forth.

One other sort of activist thing that I think is very interesting before I get into maybe why I became a lawyer and got involved in more in the direct representation of cases. At the 1980 Democratic convention, Jimmy Carter was up for reelection and re-nomination, and he was challenged by Teddy Kennedy as an insurgent, progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party.

We read it some months, a couple of months before the convention. It was announced that Bob Graham would be making the nominating speech for re-nominating Jimmy Carter to be president. This was now maybe one year after the Spenkelink execution, so this light bulb went on in my head that maybe we should organize a protest at the convention, an anti-death penalty protest during Graham’s speech.

And so I spent the next two months pretty much organizing a protest event at the Democratic National Convention, which was kind of guerrilla, Yippee-type action.

I used as my base Kennedy delegates, because I knew that probably Carter delegates were not going to participate in the protest during the nomination speech of their candidate. So I started identifying Kennedy delegates all over the country and getting in touch with them and asking them if they would be willing to participate in an anti-death penalty action during Graham’s speech.

Of course most of the Kennedy delegates were strongly anti-death penalty and they were eager to participate in something like this, so we made black executioner hoods, like hundreds of black executioner hoods, and reproduced pictures of John Spenkelink, and during Graham’s speech, several hundred delegates to the convention put on black hoods and stood up and just pointed at Bob Graham and held pictures of John Spenkelink.

And we also brought Spenkelink’s mother to the convention, who was this seventy-year-old, very obese woman from California, a sort of very working class poor woman. Her son-in-law and daughter drove her from southern California to New York, where the convention was. It was in Madison Square Garden in New York City, and my friend and I who were putting this whole thing together literally stood out on the sidewalk in front of Madison Square Garden waiting for their beat-up old station wagon to come in from

California. We had gotten people, some delegates to give us their I.D.s so we could actually get into the convention as delegates, and we had passes for Spenkelink’s mother, Lois, and so we got her into the convention and she weighed about three-hundred pounds and could barely walk, so this was kind of, I describe it as trying to smuggle a refrigerator into the convention. And so we got her seated in the New York delegation with this gigantic sign that said, “Bob Graham Killed My Son.”

And so Walter Cronkite, when he introduced the nomination speech on CBS News, gave this whole, one or two minute introduction about how Bob Graham had executed John Spenkelink and it was very controversial and all the newspapers were kneeling down at Lois Spenkelink’s chair, interviewing her and Graham who was actually, even in 1980 considered a potential presidential candidate, which he was actually as recently as probably eight years ago he ran for president, several times he has run for president.

And the headline in The Miami Herald about his speech, instead of, “Our wonderful governor nominates Jimmy Carter,” was— God, I wish I could remember the actual headline. It was something like, “Graham Bombs at Convention” or something like that, and there was a picture of Lois Spenkelink holding this big sign that said, “Bob Graham Killed My Son.”

So we felt we were pretty successful about the protest. Of course, all it did was increase Bob Graham’s popularity. He was overwhelmingly re-elected as governor and largely because he was seen as very pro-death penalty. So we actually advanced his career. I take a lot of credit for advancing Bob Graham’s political career.

So, in about 1983, actually during the next few years working with Scharlette, I worked on prison condition cases, did a lot of work going into the worst prisons in Florida and trying to find out what kinds of abuses were occurring in the prison systems: beatings of prisoners, locking up prisoners in isolation for literally six or seven years with no contact with the outside world, some really horrible things that were going on.

And we would do a lot of media around that, exposing abuses in the prison system, and we were kind of these gadflies to the prison system and they just hated us, and we literally were afraid our car would blow up going home from the prison sometimes, and the friendlier guards, when we would leave, they would say, “You be careful driving home,” and look me right in the eye.

And I was thinking, “Do you know something I don’t know?” Because this was really Ku Klux Klan country where these prisons are, which is true in almost any state, but where Florida has this whole thing I call the Valley of Death, where there are six or seven— the equivalent of Huntsville in Texas, where there is just institutions everywhere and the entire economy for hundreds of miles, it’s all built around incarceration and executions.

So during those few years, I worked on death penalty cases with Scharlette, as well as organizing around executions. Actually the next execution in Florida wasn’t until four and a half years later, that was our second execution and that was in November of 1983, which was actually my first semester at law school.

That was a guy named Bob Sullivan who was a very, really highly intelligent guy. One the things I should also say about Spenkelink that I think that was so powerful was he was a very beloved person on Death Row. He was this sort of redneckish guy, but he was totally non-racist. Like his best friends on Death Row were Black and he was really beloved by everyone on the row and all their families. That was one of the things that made it personally so compelling to people, he was a very interesting guy, was very likeable person.

Sullivan, who was the next execution in November 1983, he was also kind of like that. He was not as personable as John, but he was very smart.

He did a lot of work on his case and he was very active in promoting his own case. He was Catholic and in fact, one of the amazing things about his execution was he had actually gotten the Pope to intervene on his behalf. Through his own efforts, he contacted clergy and worked his way up through the Catholic hierarchy to where the Pope wrote a letter to the governor of Florida saying, “Please do not execute this man.”

\And so we organized some massive protests around his execution also that consisted of several hundred people camping out at the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee overnight, and it was a really moving experience.

The very famous peace activist and antiwar person, Daniel Berrigan, Father Daniel Berrigan came to Tallahassee for a few days to participate in these protests. I got the pleasure of spending a couple of days with him. He was just totally an inspirational character. I remember the night before the execution, before Sullivan’s execution, there were probably one hundred and fifty people at the governor’s mansion singing songs and banging on this cast iron fence with tire irons, just making this huge racket, and at about midnight, or maybe ten p.m., out comes Bob Graham, the governor to talk to the crowd.

And it just drove me crazy because I thought, “This is such a beautiful political move,” because he was the consummate politician, really. His way of dealing with this was to come out and try to quell the mob by showing how accessible and reasonable he was. So he came out and all the cameras were out there, it was ten o’clock at night, and this dark, the lights were all shining on him, and this crowd of all these protestors, all these people that I’d worked with for five years organizing protests, were standing around in this semi-circle, kind of mesmerized that the governor was coming out to talk to them, and he had them in the palm of his hand.

I went over and I sat down on the curb and I started crying, because I was so upset that he had gotten the upper hand. Daniel Berrigan came over and sat down next to me and he put his arm around me and it he said, “It’s okay. I’ve seen far worse than him.”

And I know he was thinking of L.B.J. and the Vietnam War and all the things he had been through. He was arrested dozens and dozens of times in protests. It was just so comforting to know that this guy who had been through so much, who had fought in so many struggles in the civil rights movement, was just putting it in perspective, this is just one more politician, “It’s okay, this too shall pass.” And it was a really incredible moment for me.

So that was my first semester at law school. Needless to say, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on my studies. I was organizing protests and working on death penalty cases and whenever I could find the time I would read my assignments and go to class. So the first semester was really rough for me.

In fact, I was still working with Scharlette full time at the Florida Clearinghouse of Criminal Justice and going to law school. We had written an article in our newsletter about the parole commission, and we had mentioned a few parole interviewers who had never been on parole, which we mentioned them by name and they sued us. So I had to miss a week of my first semester at law school to go to trial to be in a trial, a libel trial, that we were sued by the parole commission, which fortunately we won the case, but missing the whole week of work of my first semester of law school was, I was on the verge of dropping out at that point, I really was. I thought, “I can’t do this, this is just a mess.”

But how fortunate I hung in there and actually I think I was able to get through law school because it was about the third priority in my life and that made it easier for me to get through it.

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