Biography
Keith LaMar, who has taken the name Bomani Shakur in prison, is an Ohio death row prisoner whose case is among the most contested wrongful-conviction cases in U.S. capital litigation. He was 19 years old and serving an 18-year sentence for an unrelated 1989 manslaughter when, on April 11, 1993, the Lucasville Prison Uprising began at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Over the eleven days of the uprising one prison guard and nine prisoners were killed. LaMar was charged with five of the prisoner killings and tried by an all-white jury in 1995 in rural Lawrence County, Ohio. He was sentenced to death.
He has consistently maintained his innocence. The state has never produced any physical evidence connecting him to the killings; the conviction rested entirely on the testimony of incarcerated witnesses, several of whom received reductions in their own sentences in exchange. Years of post-conviction litigation have established that the prosecution failed to disclose statements from other prisoners identifying different killers — Brady violations the federal courts have nonetheless declined to remedy.
He has spent the past three decades in solitary confinement, almost entirely at the Ohio State Penitentiary supermax in Youngstown. His memoir Condemned: The Whole Story (2014) is widely cited in U.S. carceral writing. His scheduled execution date of January 13, 2027 (rescheduled from 2023 by Governor DeWine) makes him one of the most prominent imprisoned writers in the United States.
