Fund Appeal by Jeff Mackler: On Lynne Stewart’s final days (written March 5)

March 8th, 2017

Dear Friends,

This morning I spoke with Lynne Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, at their home in Brooklyn, NY. 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, NY. 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 1960’s 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, where I headed Lynne’s defense committee on the West Coast, Lynne was cruelly sentenced to ten years in a Texas prison, after vindictive federal prosecutors appealed a federal Court judge’s sentence of some 18 months. After serving 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 Mumia Abu-Jamal’s most ardent supporters. Lynne’s court cases included some of the seminal Weatherrman 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 longterm friend, Betty Davis.

Please send your generous contribution as per the information at https://www.generosity.com/emergencies-fundraising/financial-appeal-for-lynne-stewart-health-crisis

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,
Past West Coast Coordinator, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
and Director, Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

Thanks to the generous support of Resist, Inc. - Funding social change since 1967.