Free Lumumba Woods

I write this week’s dispatch with some distressing news. I received a letter two weeks ago from Lumumba Woods, who was released two years ago from a long term upstate. I met Lumumba last summer when he began attending online meetings with the New York Reentry Education Network (NYREN). He started his college education inside as part of John Jay's College Initiative program, and finished his undergraduate work over the past couple of years while navigating the NYC homeless shelters. He was a writer, an English major, pensive and thoughtful but wanting to plug his consciousness into action. I began having regular check-in’s with him, and he participated on a panel last November as part of my college’s Human Rights Awareness Week event in conversation with one of my honors students who had taken a class recently on prison writing. 

“I know why you assigned us together,” I remember her telling me after her first conversation with him. “Because we’re both English majors!” 

In late December, though, all of a sudden I didn’t hear from him. I followed up with him periodically, but once the Spring semester started I assumed that he must just be busy with his graduate school applications.

His mother reached out to me three weeks ago that he was in some trouble, and then sent me a letter from him this weekend. In sum, last December he was arrested after an accident while driving in Nassau County. He'd been out with a friend, who was the passenger in the car and was hurt in the accident. He was taken in on a misdemeanor DWI. Once the DA’s office saw he had a criminal record, though, his charges escalated to felony DWI, assault with a deadly weapon, and vehicular assault, and he was detained on $100,000 bail.

Lumumba's now been sitting in jail in East Meadow for seven months without a formal indictment. His friend who was hurt in the accident has settled with her insurance and has refused to file a criminal complaint. After his court-appointed 18B lawyer made it predictably clear that they weren’t going to speak to Lumumba outside the courtroom, his mother hired a local lawyer in March But that lawyer has by Lumumba’s account done absolutely nothing thus far. In Lumumba's words, "I was deprived of the rights under bail reform where affordable bail should have been set, and evidence made available within 15 calendar days. I have been deprived of being released on my own recognizance after being locked-up over 180 days without an indictment."

John Jay’s College Initiative is now involved, as every administrator who knows him is aghast at this and supporting him in whatever ways they can, writing letters of commendation and offering to testify as character witnesses. They have a special counsel on retainer to work specifically with graduates of their program, but in a horribly ironic twist, their lawyer  can’t offer legal advice because he has hired the lawyer who has taken $5,000 from his family and done nothing of record yet. 

My ask of you is twofold:

• I have a small ad hoc team working on Lumumba’s case, but unfortunately Nassau County is out of the purview of me and the organizations I work with, which are centered in New York City proper and Westchester County. I’m currently researching Nassau County-based organizations, but I could use a little bit of help. If you are familiar with or have contacts in the Nassau County legal system, or if you would like to be part of the Free Lumumba organizing team, just respond here and we can talk further.

• A simpler ask is this: write Lumumba a letter! Jail is a lonely place, and I fear Lumumba might be losing faith that the world outside Nassau County Correctional Facility cares. He and his mother have given me his address, so please, if you have a few minutes, send him some love:

Lumumba Woods
B&C#2020002259
Nassau County Correctional Facility
100 Carmen Ave.
East Meadow, NY 11554

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Also, a little announcement: After seven straight months of a dispatch every Friday from one of our collective members, we’re taking the month of August off! We'll return in September with fresh dispatches, new workshops—hopefully including a resumption of the Rikers workshop—new partnerships, and new methodologies. Stay tuned for one more dispatch next week, and then have a restful, restorative August, my friends.