Author Archives: Family and Friends

Mutulu Granted Parole

Today, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a 72-year-old grandfather and respected healer and elder was granted parole by the US Parole Commission. The Parole Commission has recognized that his release poses no risk, particularly in light of his medical condition. He will be released shortly. Mutulu is one of thousands of incarcerated older people in federal and state prisons who has been repeatedly denied parole for over a decade after completing his minimum sentence.

Mutulu is deeply grateful and thankful for the broad expression of trust and support, and thanks everyone who has helped him over the years. We ask that he have space and time to be with family when he is released and to continue receiving medical treatment.

We welcome him home with great joy.


Many people have asked what they can do to support him. Family & Friends of Mutulu Shakur is continuing to collect donations that will go to support his transition to life outside prison. The only official ways to donate are listed on our Ways to Support page.

September Health and Legal Update

Healthwise, Dr. Shakur’s condition is changing on a weekly basis. He did gain a few pounds in early August and was able to go back on chemotherapy. However, shortly thereafter, he developed an infection in his knee and had to stop chemo in order to treat that infection. The legal team continues to monitor the care that he is receiving to advocate for him in the best possible way.

On the legal front, Judge Haight again denied the motion for compassionate release. However, unlike his 2021 denial claiming that Mutulu was not sick enough at that time to be granted compassionate release, this time he denied the motion on procedural grounds saying that the court does not have the authority to grant his compassionate release [see the Ruling]. This contention is because Dr. Shakur is an ‘Old Law’ prisoner, and, therefore, the Bureau of Prisons would need to grant compassionate release. This ‘Old Law’ status is somewhat of a legal grey area that unfortunately Dr. Shakur and other aging prisoners are caught in. The legal team is submitting a new compassionate release request to the BOP based on Haight’s decision and updated medical information. Also this week, the legal team was notified that Dr. Shakur will be scheduled for another parole hearing the week of October 10th. We anxiously await news from the BOP as we prepare for this hearing.

Please continue to keep Mutulu in your thoughts and prayers. He is conserving his energy for the rest and healing he needs, so he is for the most part not reading mail or corresponding with people. He can feel the love y’all are sending through the walls though, and he is sending it right back!

The Final Straw Radio Interview w/ Watani Tyehimba about Dr. Shakur

Watani Tyehimba of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and a supporter and comrade of New Afrikan political prisoner Dr. Mutulu Shakur speaking about Dr. Shakur’s life, activism and the struggle for his release since he’s been diagnosed with serious bone cancer.

Listen to the episode or download the transcript on The Final Straw Radio website.

August 2022 Health & Legal Update

Today is Mutulu’s 72nd birthday.

The fact that he is held in prison at this stage in his life and with his current medical condition is a clear violation of his rights. His legal team is filing a habeas petition in Kentucky to challenge his continuing imprisonment in that state. This is a lawsuit against the warden at FMC Lexington, the Chair of the Parole Commission and the Hearing Examiner who conducted the latest parole hearing because denying him release is “arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion.”

Mutulu’s health continues to be dire, and Bureau of Prison doctors have given him less than six months to live. Multiple myeloma is incurable, and Mutulu was diagnosed with this in 2019. That diagnosis probably would have come sooner had it not been for bureaucratic delays in diagnostic testing of the bone pain he had been experiencing for some time. Now, despite radiation, different types of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, the cancer continues to grow. ‘Compassionate release’ or reduction of sentence exists to allow for people to spend their final days outside the confines of prison. It is inhumane that the Bureau of Prisons and the Parole Commission continue to deny him release, yet the sentencing judge Charles Haight still has the power to grant him compassionate release. We thank everyone for signing the online petition to show not only the Bureau of Prisons and the Parole Commission, but also Judge Haight, that there are over 60,000 people supporting his release.

Join us tonight to commemorate Mutulu’s 72nd birthday with a call to action for his release.

We will gather online at 7:20 PM EST for a 72-minute program to hear from those who love Mutulu and are fighting for his freedom.

Register at: https://bit.ly/mutulubdayaction

Sacrifice: Dr. Mutulu Shakur – Mini-Series in Production

We are pleased to announce there is a new mini series about Dr. Mutulu Shakur in production– Sacrifice. Spearheaded by his con, Talib Shakur, the series features stories told by the men who were incarcerated, mentored and inspired by Dr. Shakur. Contact us for more information on how to be featured in the documentary or how to support this project on the unparalleled impact and positive work of Dr. Shakur.

‘Juneteenth and Black Liberation’ by Nebil Husayn

Our government’s history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons

Published on July 15, 2022 on Inquest: A Decarceral Brainstorm by the Institute to End Mass Incerceration

This was only the second year that Americans celebrated Juneteenth as a federal holiday. This day of remembrance, and our nation’s oldest African American holiday, recognizes the fundamental reality that citizens can be unjustly barred from rights afforded to them by their government for years. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which reached Texas more than two years after its signing, was followed by the 13th Amendment, which made human enslavement unconstitutional “except as a punishment for crime.” As it is well documented, this exception incentivized the targeted incarceration of Black men for labor, perpetuated slavery, and served white communities that upheld myths about Black criminality.

Icons of abolition and racial justice such as Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela lived in eras where their activism and acts of civil disobedience on behalf of other Black lives were considered unlawful and worthy of imprisonment. Yet the history of repression and oppression surrounding their actions greatly mitigates and helps explain them.

In their lifetimes, both Malcolm X and Dr. King were considered radical Black leaders and agitators who divided the nation with their critiques of American culture and society. It is in studying the history of these Black activists accused by their peers of radicalism that we can see the ways in which many were villainized and gradually written out of narratives of Black history. Public school students do not commonly learn about the Stono slave rebellion, the insurrection of Nat Turner, the contributions of Malcolm X, or the most famous revolutionary movement to uplift Black communities with a national network of social welfare initiatives — the Black Panther Party. 

Founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a grassroots Marxist-Leninist organization that urged members to challenge the endemic pattern of police brutality and false imprisonment of Black people in Oakland, California, with armed patrols. Under its longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI considered Pan-African and Black nationalist movements such as the Panthers threats to national security, and many were subjected to unlawful surveillance, intimidation, incarceration, and assault. The highest-profile targets of this coordinated assault were the leaders and members of the Black Panther Party. The urgency with which the party demanded an immediate end to police brutality as part of its Ten Point Program was not a sentiment shared by most Americans until, perhaps, 54 years later — when video footage captured the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

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Faith-based Leaders all over the U.S. Call for Compassionate Release

Over a hundred faith-based leaders sign a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission, U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Department of Justice voicing strong support for Mutulu’s compassionate release. The letter, penned to promote the values of redemption and salvation, is addressed to the U.S. Parole Commission Chair Patricia Cushwa, FMC Lexington Warden Francisco Quintana, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. It will be hand-delivered by a delegation this month followed by a press conference.

New article in the Intercept on Dr. Shakur’s current plight

From: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/22/mutulu-shakur-dying-prison-cancer/

When Mutulu Shakur applied for compassionate release in 2020, the presiding judge told the Black liberation elder that he was not close enough to death. At the time, Shakur was 70 and had spent nearly half his life in federal prison, where a moribund parole system created interminable barriers for his release.

In 2020, he was sick with hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, glaucoma, and the aftereffects of a 2013 stroke while in solitary confinement. He also faced high risks of severe Covid-19 complications. The cancer in his bone marrow, though, was not yet killing him fast enough. It was understood to be terminal, but chemotherapy treatment had been successful in keeping it at bay.

As such, according to then-90-year-old Judge Charles Haight Jr. — the very same judge who had sentenced Shakur to prison over three decades before — the respected and beloved elder, who posed zero risk to society and held an impeccable institutional record, was not eligible for compassion.

“Should it develop that Shakur’s condition deteriorates further, to the point of approaching death, he may apply again to the Court, for a release that in those circumstances could be justified as ‘compassionate,’” the judge wrote in his decision.

The judge is still alive and, astoundingly, on the bench. Shakur, meanwhile, is on the very edge of death.

Two years later, Haight is still alive and, astoundingly, on the bench. Shakur, meanwhile, is on the very edge of death, cancer disabling his every bodily capacity.

Bureau of Prisons-contracted doctors have given him less than six months. The prison chaplain has advised his family members to come “very soon” to say their final goodbyes. Shakur may not even be able to recognize them.

According to reports from prison staff, he is “hallucinating,” “confused,” at times “unintelligible,” needs assistance with all so-called “Activities of Daily Living,” and is “frequently incontinent.” The details of his condition were revealed by medical professionals and Shakur’s family members in an emergency motion for compassionate release, which was filed by his lawyers on Sunday,

Shakur weighs 125 pounds and is unable to get out of bed. His support team told me that he currently resides in the federal prison hospital at FMC Lexington, where “he is too ill to have visitors as his white blood count is too low and he is completely immune-compromised.” (In response to my request for comment on Shakur’s condition, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson wrote, “For privacy, safety, and security reasons, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) does not discuss information on any individual inmate’s conditions of confinement including medical care.”)

The time for true compassion — or anything close to justice — has long passed for Shakur, well-known as rapper Tupac’s stepfather and celebrated for bringing holistic health care and self-determination to the Bronx’s Black community in the 1970s. Like most Black liberation elders, the circumstances of Shakur’s conviction were colored by the government’s decades-long, all-out war on the movement. This should not be forgotten, but it is also not relevant to the current grounds for Shakur’s long overdue release.

The question now is simply whether the federal punishment system will, against its own purported standards, force a dying man to expire behind bars out of ideological intransigence.

Shakur was a member of the Black nationalist organization Republic of New Afrika, which worked closely with Black Panther Party members and New Left activists. He was convicted of racketeering conspiracy charges alongside several Black liberationists and leftist allies for his involvement in the 1981 robbery of an armored truck during which a guard and two police officers were killed. He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur. He has taken responsibility for his crimes and repeatedly expressed remorse for the lives lost and pain caused. All of his co-defendants have been released or have died.

Co-defendant Marilyn Buck, who was convicted on the same charges as Shakur, was granted compassionate release by the Bureau of Prisons on July 15, 2010. She died of uterine cancer on August 3 that year.

The harsh standard applied in Buck’s case was the same one that the judge used in denying Shakur’s release two years ago: Come back only when, like Buck, your only activity outside of prison walls will be dying. Shakur has now arrived at this tragic place. Anything but immediate release constitutes an abundance of cruelty.

Shakur’s release has been blocked by layer upon layer of institutional intransigence and procedural arcana. Even while a number former Black Panthers and other liberation elders — all incarcerated for all too many decades in state prison systems — have finally been released on parole in recent years, the strange vagaries of outdated federal rules, abuses of discretion, and administrative failures have foreclosed such relief for Shakur.

Shakur’s legal team has sought every avenue for his release, including the superannuated federal parole system, the Bureau of Prisons’ compassionate release process, the calculation of Shakur’s earned “good time” in prison, and even the unlikely route of presidential clemency — all to no avail.

As a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson wrote in response to my request for comment on its process for compassionate release motions, “At all times, the decision on whether to grant such a motion — whether brought on behalf of the Director of the BOP, or the inmate themselves — lies with the sentencing court.”

In the federal system, compassionate release rulings are determined by the very court —the very judge — that sentenced a defendant in the first place. Shakur’s fate is once again in his sentencing judge’s hands. Yet there is hope in the fact that Haight himself previously wrote that in circumstances of “imminent” death, compassionate release “could be justified.” As Shakur’s lawyers note in their motion, “It is now imminent.”

Both prior to and during his incarceration, Shakur has been respected as a mentor and a healer. In the emergency motion for his release, numerous men incarcerated alongside Shakur are cited, attesting to his profound positive influence on their lives.

“I recognize Dr. Mutulu Shakur not only as my father, but as the man who changed my way of thinking and saved my life,” wrote Ra’ Sekou P’tah, who was serving a double-life sentence plus 30 years for a nonviolent drug offense when he met Shakur. President Barack Obama commuted P’tah’s sentence after he had served 20 years. When reporting on Shakur’s case last year, I heard several similar stories of mentorship and care from men formerly incarcerated with the Black liberation elder.

The time has passed for Shakur to continue his healing community work as a free man. He will not live to see his mandatory release date in 2024. He is, as his lawyers note in their motion, “on the downward side of an end-of life trajectory.”

The least — and it is the very least — Haight, the judge, can do now in the name of decency would be to allow Shakur to die in the California home of his son and daughter-in-law, in the presence of loved ones, uncaged.