Biography
Omar Seku was one of the Attica Brothers — the prisoners the state of New York prosecuted after the September 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, which was crushed when state forces retook the prison and killed 29 inmates and 10 hostages. He spent some two years in solitary confinement after being accused of kidnapping a guard, Franklin Kline, and stabbing an inmate, Ronald Lyons — accusations the prosecution abandoned after both Kline and Lyons told reporters the stabbing never happened and that Seku had in fact helped protect the guard. As The Black Panther reported (February 1, 1975), the Attica Brothers' defense, led by William Kunstler and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, won a string of pretrial rulings exposing the weakness of the state's cases; most of the 42 indictments against 62 men were ultimately dismissed, and Governor Hugh Carey closed out the prosecutions and granted clemencies in 1976.
