My 51-Day Court Odyssey

I

The Bus

Nov 21–22, 2005 · Mule Creek State Prison to Chino

Nov 21 · 10:00 a.m.On November 21, 2005, at exactly 10:00 a.m., I was handed a blue paper jumpsuit and marched onto one of those big, green-and-chrome California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) buses. A hulking monstrosity that rumbled and hissed like an animal as it waited to devour its passengers. Destination: Los Angeles, for a December 1 federal court hearing — a long shot for freedom, maybe, but still a shot.

The first leg took us through Old Folsom and New Folsom prisons, just spitting distance from one another, and then down to Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI) in Tracy. It was late by the time we pulled in, and the Receiving & Release (R&R) staff at DVI weren’t exactly on their A-game. They dumped me into General Population (GP) Tank D — thirty inmates crammed into a concrete box. Now, here’s the rub: I was SNY, Sensitive Needs Yard. That’s a fancy way of saying you’re marked — by choice or by circumstance. And for GP guys, someone like me is target practice. It didn’t blow up that night, thank God. I sat there trying to radiate “don’t fuck with me” vibes until after dinner when I sidled up to a lieutenant and quietly said, “I don’t belong here.” By some miracle, he listened. I was pulled out, reunited with the SNY crowd in stand-up cages, and eventually housed in J Wing, cell 302.

1. Mule CreekIoneNov 21 · 10:00 a.m.
2. Old Folsom
3. New Folsom
4. DVITracythe first night
5. North KernDelanoNov 22 · 4:30 a.m. + 5 hrs
6. CRCNorco+ 5 hrs
7. CIM ChinoReception Center Central49 days

Nov 22 · 4:30 a.m.At 4:30 a.m. the next morning, November 22, I was on the move again. The bus rolled south, five hours to North Kern State Prison in Delano, then another punishing five hours to the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, and finally, we hit the California Institution for Men’s Reception Center Central (RCC) in Chino. By the time I was herded off, I was shoved into a standing-room-only single-man cage. Eight p.m. came and went before they moved me to a 4-by-20-foot expanded metal cage in the hallway to sleep — if you can call it that.

II

Hallway Cages

Nov 22–23 · CIM Chino, Reception Center Central

Nov 23November 23 wasn’t much better. They crammed me into a smaller cage, 4 by 11 feet, with five other guys. One was in a wheelchair, two were easily 300 pounds, and the rest of us? We took turns on a 10-foot bench or the garbage-strewn floor. Toilets and sinks? Don’t make me laugh. It was animalistic. The L.A. Times had just run a piece about Chino’s hallway cages, but any heat from that coverage didn’t reach the ground level. The staff didn’t care, not after one of their own was killed in January 2005 — a brutal stabbing by a convicted murderer in another block. That kind of violence has a way of locking everyone into their worst instincts. For the guards, it was about survival. Screw comfort. Screw dignity.

4 × 20 ft One man, one night, in the hallway

4 × 11 ft Six men, one bench: about seven square feet each

III

Cypress Day Room

Nov 23, 2005 – Jan 10, 2006 · Bunk 25

That night, I got “lucky.” They moved me into Bunk 25 in the Cypress Day Room. Calling it a “dayroom” is like calling a cardboard box a penthouse suite. It had once been a satellite kitchen but was gutted, stuffed with 21 double bunks, and rebranded as housing for 42 poor bastards. It measured 29 by 56 feet — tile stains on the floor told me that much. My bunk faced six small windows up high on the north wall. Through those, I caught glimpses of Mount Baldy, its peak sometimes dusted with snow. That view was the only mercy the place offered.

The Cypress Day Room was a petri dish of misery. Three toilets sat exposed in the southwest corner, separated by half walls that didn’t block much of anything. One toilet was a “stand-up only,” another was a “sit-down only,” and the middle one was supposed to do both. The sit-down? Always broken. Privacy? Forget it. Hygiene was a joke. The shower didn’t work, so we hauled water from the sink in a 5-gallon bucket and poured it over ourselves using old Folger’s jars. I borrowed deodorant when I could, returned the favor when I got my own, and made alliances based on nothing more than the shared enemy of funk.

The lights stayed on 24/7, fluorescent tubes buzzing like insects. Sleep came in fits. I passed the time reading All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. The TV, mounted high in the corner, was controlled by the “shot caller” of each racial group — White, Mexican, and Black — rotating every three days. Racial politics were alive and well, even in SNY. The TV was our only connection to the outside world. I’d catch glimpses of Los Angeles, my Los Angeles, on the news or in some crappy sitcom, and it reminded me why I was fighting to get out.

Dec 25Fights broke out constantly; fistfights were an almost daily occurrence. More in 49 days at Cypress than in a year at Mule Creek’s SNY C-Facility. Christmas Day saw a near-riot when some drunken gang dropout, sloshed on pruno, started yelling at everyone to “shut the fuck up!” over and over until a former Blood snapped and came for him. The guards swooped in, grabbed some of the booze, and then left — like nothing had happened. The rest of the pruno stayed, and so did the tension.

Dec 12On December 12, a 400-pound inmate named Alex James had a heart attack. He collapsed near the toilets, and another guy managed to bring him back with CPR, but James didn’t make it to the hospital alive. His death hung in the air like the smell of the place — oppressive and inescapable.

IV

The Road Back

Jan 10–11, 2006 · Chino to Mule Creek

Jan 10, 2006Finally, on January 10, 2006, I was told to pack up. My trip back to Mule Creek was another grind: Tehachapi, North Kern, San Quentin, and more stops than I can count. But when I rolled into Mule Creek late that night, it felt like home. They gave me my belongings — including my typewriter — and I finally breathed easier.

1. CIM ChinoJan 10
2. Tehachapi
3. North Kern
4. San Quentin
5. …more stops than I can count
6. Mule Creekhome

V

The Reason

Dec 1–9, 2005 · United States District Court, Los Angeles

The whole reason for this hellish trip? A hearing before Federal Magistrate Judge Ralph Zarefsky — a chance to dismantle the pack of lies that sent me to prison in the first place. And we did it, piece by rotten piece. The bloody footprints the cops swore were mine? Not a chance. They belonged to the real killer, just like I’d said all along. That “mystery intruder” they scoffed at? He wasn’t a mystery anymore. The snitch they propped up? His story parroted details straight out of the police reports — details he could never have known if he hadn’t conned me into sharing those reports, then had his lies polished by the dirty cops in an unrecorded first interview. The one everyone called the first was really opening night: his lines, delivered well enough to pass.

We laid it all bare. Weather data and scene reconstructions proved I could see my mom through the window, just as I’d told that slimy detective hours after I found her. The cops lied through their teeth, over and over, while I told the truth from day one. Then came the real kicker: the same cops and paramedics who swore during the ’85 trial that they handled the scene with kid gloves — they were now tripping over themselves to say they’d probably stomped through all the blood puddles, leaving behind that crucial bloody print. Back then, their story was airtight: no contamination, no mistakes; the print had to be mine. Why? Because that’s what their case needed. Now, with FBI and LAPD footwear experts both proving the print didn’t match my shoes, suddenly they’re claiming they were the ones who tracked blood all over the house. Their bullshit fell apart, right there in Zarefsky’s courtroom, and it was a long time coming.

As awful as that disgusting Cypress Dayroom was, the courtroom action was good – and I mean fucking gooood!

Dec 9, 2005On December 9, 2005, my dream team of attorneys, and our opponents, rested. Then came the waiting. For months, Judge Zarefsky pored over the record: every transcript, every exhibit, every sworn word, weighed for the truth. On May 4, 2006, he ruled. The hearing, he wrote, had “effectively dismantled the case the prosecution presented at trial.” None of it “withstands scrutiny.” There was “essentially no evidence” of my guilt beyond my own brief statements, and “a strong suggestion that someone else was responsible for the crime.” It was “more likely than not that no reasonable juror would convict” me. That finding broke the stranglehold of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and threw the courthouse doors back open. Even then, freedom made me wait three more years. On August 13, 2009, my petition for a writ of habeas corpus was granted, and I walked free.

VI

The Other Side

The journey south was hell, but it was a road I had to take. Freedom was on the other side.

Bruce E. Lisker