Thomas Edward Silverstein (born February 4, 1952) is an American proven killer. He has been jailed continuously since 1977 and has been convicted of four separate killings while in jail, one of which was canceled. He has been in solitary confinement since 1983, when he killed the Merle Clutts Corruption Officer at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois. The prison authorities described him as a brutal murderer and former leader of Aryan Brotherhood's prison gang. Silverstein stated that the inhuman conditions within the prison system contributed to his three murders. He was detained "in a specially designed cell" in the so-called "Range 13" in Florence's federal ADX prison in Colorado. He is currently the longest inmate in solitary confinement inside the Prison Bureau.
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Thomas Silverstein was born in Long Beach, California, to Virginia Conway. Conway had divorced her first husband in 1952 when pregnant with Silverstein and married Thomas Conway, whom Silverstein claims was her biological father. Four years later, Virginia divorced Conway and married Sid Silverstein, who legitimately adopted his son.
Silverstein is shy, awkward, shy, and often bullied as a child in a middle-class neighborhood where the family lives. Virginia Silverstein demanded that his son fight back, telling the boy that if he came back crying because he had been beaten by a bully, he would wait to beat him again. Silverstein declared, "That's my mother, she stood the mud, if someone comes to you with a bat, you get your bat and you both do it." At the age of fourteen, Silverstein was sentenced to a California Youth Pemuda reformer where, he said, his attitude about violence was strengthened. "Anyone who does not want to fight is abused."
In 1971, at the age of nineteen, Silverstein was sent to San Quentin Prison in California for armed robbery. Four years later, he was released, but he was arrested soon after with his father, Thomas Conway, and his cousin, Gerald Hoff, for three armed robberies. Their collection is less than $ 11,000. In 1977, Silverstein was sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery, to be served at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
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Murder in USP Marion
While at Leavenworth, Silverstein developed a relationship with the Aryan Brotherhood. In 1980, Silverstein was convicted for the murder of inmate Danny Atwell, who reportedly refused to serve as a mule for heroin being moved through prison. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois (USP Marion), which was then a high security facility. The conviction was overturned in 1985 after it emerged that the prison informant who testified at his trial had sworn falsely standing in the pulpit.
In Marion, Silverstein is placed in "Control Unit", a virtual solitary confinement system provided for extreme "management problems" (prisoners susceptible to deviant and disturbing behavior) in prison.
In 1981, Silverstein was accused of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the Blacks D.C. prison gang. Silverstein and other inmates, Clayton Fountain, were found guilty and Silverstein received an additional life sentence. Silverstein maintains his innocence. While Silverstein was on trial for the Chappelle murder, the Prison Bureau transferred Raymond "Cadillac" Smith, the national leader of the D.C prison gang. Blacks, from another prison to the control unit in Marion. From the moment Smith arrives at the control unit, the prison records show that he started trying to kill Silverstein.
"I tried to tell Cadillac that I did not kill Chappelle, but he did not trust me and he boasted he would kill me," Silverstein said. "Everyone knows what's going on and nobody does anything to get us apart, the guards want one of us to kill the other." Silverstein and Clayton Fountain killed Smith with an improvised weapon, stabbing him 67 times. After Smith died, they dragged his body up and down the catwalk in front of the cell, posting it to another prisoner. Silverstein received another life sentence.
Killings of Clutts and Hoffmann Correction Officers
On October 22, 1983, Silverstein killed the Merle Clutts Correction Officer at USP Marion. After getting out of his cell to bathe, Silverstein uses a trick to get Clutts to walk in front of him and position himself among Clutts and other officers. He stopped outside the other prison cell, Randy Gometz. Gometz passed a homemade prison knife, known as a calf, to Silverstein and unlocked the Silverstein handcuffs with homemade keys. Silverstein then attacked Clutts, stabbing him several dozen times. Silverstein then claims that he killed Clutts in retaliation for Clutts deliberately harassing him. Among them, Clutts was accused of destroying the paintings by Silverstein.
Hours later, Silverstein's friend Clayton Fountain (also a member of the Aryan Brotherhood) used the same strategy to kill another correction officer, Robert Hoffmann.
USP Marion was then placed on an unlimited lock, which lasted for 23 years. After Clutts's assassination, Silverstein was transferred to the US Prison, Atlanta, where he was placed in solitary confinement. The security status is listed as "no human contact." The events surrounding the Clutts murder of the Correction Officer and Hoffmann inspired the design of the federal supermax prison, the United States Penitentiary Florence ADX (USP Florence ADX) in Colorado, which opened in 1994 and was built to accommodate the most dangerous prisoners in the federal prison system. Silverstein and Gometz are both currently detained at ADX Florence. Fountain died at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri in 2004.
Unrest in Atlanta and transfer to Leavenworth
During the 1987 Atlanta Prison Riot, Cuban prisoners in Atlanta's federal prison freed Silverstein from his isolation cell. They handed Silverstein to the Federal Bureau Hostage Rescue Team one week later. Prison Bureau officials are reportedly fearful that Silverstein will start killing prison officers held hostage by Cubans. Before Cuba released Silverstein to the Bureau of Prisons, the Cubans let Silverstein out of his isolation cell and Silverstein was free to roam the prison. One of the guarded prisoners has a history of being kind to Silverstein. (When the guard will bind Silverstein he will make a point to ask Silverstein if his handcuffs are too tight.) Prison bureau officers can convince Cuban riot leaders to hand Silverstein as a gesture of goodwill, a relatively easy decision for them, given that Silverstein's status is part of the Cuban leaders' goals during the riots.
Silverstein then moved back to Leavenworth, where he lived for the next 18 years.
In 2005, when USP Leavenworth was relegated to a medium-sized security facility, Silverstein was transferred to ADX Florence, a supermax facility in Colorado. Its earliest theoretical release date is November 2, 2095.
Allegations of torture and injustice
Silverstein claims that the status of "no human contact" is essentially a form of torture reserved for those who kill prison officers. "When a prisoner kills a guard, he should be punished," a prison officials official told author Pete Earley. "We can not execute Silverstein, so we have no choice but to make his life like hell, otherwise the other inmates will kill the guard as well.There must be the highest punishment Every prisoner knows what Silverstein is going through We want them to realize that if they crossed the same line as he did, they would pay an expensive price. "Ted's seller, a former convict who met Silverstein for 25 years spent in jail, says he became a" legend "in Leavenworth. The seller told BBC News Online: "She's not as bad as they describe It must be dangerous if they push her against the wall, but there are some stinking rotten guards in Marion... They will deliberately mess you up.You're dealing with someone locked up 23 hours a day Of course he has a short fuse. "
References
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Source of the article : Wikipedia
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