Biography
New Afrikan political prisoner from the Black Liberation tradition. Identified as a petitioner in the 1990 Special International Tribunal on Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the United States.
Mohaman Geuka Koti (s/n James Johnson, c.1927–2016) was a Black Liberation Army-associated revolutionary. In the late 1970s he was convicted of attempted murder after shooting a New York City police officer during a traffic stop — he maintained the officer drew first, and the officer recovered. Offered a seven-and-a-half-year plea, he demanded a trial and was sentenced to 25 years to life. He served decades, was released in early 2016, and died at 89 about two months later.
Mohamman Koti, formerly known as James Carter Johnson, was a Black ____ and an innocent man who, at the time of his incarceration, was the oldest man in the NY prison system (age 87). In 1978, Koti after a shootout with the police in Manhattan that led to an officer's injury. Koti turned down a plea offer, which would have given him a prison sentence of 7.5 to 15 years in state prison. Instead, he proceeded to trial and received a sentence of 25 years to life. Koti would go on to suffer from Myasthenia Gravis, a disease that causes his immune system to attack itself, as well as asthma, prostate cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Koti was regularly hospitalized.
Ten years after Koti was eligible for parole, he was profiled in a 2013 New York Times column about prisoners over the age of 60 who are denied release based on their original crime, instead of an accurate assessment of the threat they pose. Koti suffered from several medical problems and used a wheelchair, but he was still found to be at risk of committing another crime. He was ultimately granted parole in September 2014, but because of a pending bank robbery charge from the time of his arrest, he was ordered to serve an additional year in prison at a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina. Mr. Koti was released from New York State custody in 2015 and picked up by the Federal BOP and remanded to Butner Medical Facility in North Carolina to complete a prior sentence.
He was released in 2016 and passed away just two months later in a nursing home in Staten Island.
