Biography
Leonard Alexander was a Black inmate at the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad who, in a letter published by The Black Panther in 1980, appealed to the Prisoners' Rights Task Force for help defending himself and twelve other Black prisoners being tried on murder, assault and conspiracy charges arising from racial disturbances at Soledad in 1979. He alleged the district attorney and the Department of Corrections used perjured informant testimony, rewarded prosecution witnesses with sentence commutations, and forced Black defendants before all-white juries. The charges stemmed from the December 6, 1979 riot in Whitney Hall, a Soledad housing unit, in which one inmate was stabbed to death in his cell and others were wounded. Alexander — who worked as the prison visiting-room photographer and served as the Black representative for B wing on the Men's Advisory Council — was, after an earlier trial ended in a hung jury, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit assault upon an inmate (People v. Alexander, 140 Cal. App. 3d 647, 1983).
