Killer Lectured at Stanford : Johnny Spain Getting By With Help From Friends

It’s a long way from Vacaville state prison to Stanford University.

But there was Johnny Spain--the convicted murderer, ex-Black Panther and survivor of the bloodiest riot in California prison history--enrapturing a class of Stanford undergraduates with tales of life behind bars.

Eight months after his release from the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, Spain is trying to prove his friends, lawyer, supportive politicians and prison officials right: this worst of the worst inmates rehabilitated himself.

Spain, 39, is somber when he tells students about the murder he committed at 17 in Los Angeles, and can be “painfully honest” about it, a student said. He will not talk in detail about his role in the San Quentin bloodshed, saving that for a new trial ahead of him.

Spain also is self-confident, calling his own transition from prison to freedom “remarkable.” In an interview, he said he crashed his pickup truck recently and needed $500 for the deductible on his insurance policy.

“To be able to go to the bank, and write a check and get the money--that’s the beautiful part of it. I can carry my own load,” he said.

This is not to say life on the outside has been entirely easy.

“I do understand why people get out and don’t make it. It’s tough for me, and I have had all these people helping,” said Spain, who spent 21 years at Soledad, San Quentin and Vacaville prisons. “The transition from that ‘nothing’ back there, to this, it’s going to take some time. It’s going to take some time to learn to walk alone.”

Over the objections of state parole officials, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered Spain’s release on March 10, ruling that he served enough time for the 1966 murder. Two years ago, the judge overturned Spain’s conviction in connection with the murders of two prison guards in the San Quentin uprising and ordered a new trial.

The state attorney general’s appeal of the ruling in the San Quentin case is pending before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal. With his legal problems far from over, Spain knows that how he spends this time of freedom may determine whether he will have to return to prison.

Watched, helped and guided by close friends he met during the tumult of the prison rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the San Quentin trial, Spain has lectured to groups as far away as Oberlin College in Ohio.

He traveled to Washington for an interview on national television, and to New Orleans, where he met his father for the first time. He went to Mississippi for the funeral of his mother, a white woman who felt forced by Southern racism of 1955 to send her 6-year-old son by a black man to live with a black family in Los Angeles.

Taught at Stanford

Spain also is advancing in his job at a San Francisco firm that makes glass showcases, and until this week was co-teaching a class at Stanford with Kathy Kornblith, a private investigator who has worked on his case since 1971.

Entitled “Society Behind Bars,” the class dealt with crime and punishment issues, focusing on prisons. Speakers included advocates of victims’ rights whose children have been murdered, the warden of Folsom State Prison, a prison guard, a probation officer and a former inmate of San Quentin’s Death Row. Students toured San Quentin, though Spain skipped that.

“I’d think some people would be concerned that their sons and daughters were being taught by a guy like Johnny Spain,” said Folsom Warden Robert G. Borg, who told the class of his success in reducing violence at his prison.

“I happen to think prisons are doing a good job,” he said, adding that in his visit, he tried to counter what he suspected was a skewed view students had received during the course about the corrections department’s efforts.

Borg, a 29-year veteran of the system, went to the class not knowing that Spain was one of the teachers. He’s not sure he would have gone if he had known.

“I’d like to think I probably would have shown up, in spite of my personal feelings,” he said, referring to the San Quentin riot, a chapter that forever will pain officials whose fellow officers were murdered and maimed.

“A few years ago, I damned sure wouldn’t have shown up. But now I’m a little older. I think it’s important that you get a different view. The fact that I was invited is a plus. I think I had some impact.”

The three-unit, pass-fail class was offered through the Stanford Workshop on Political and Social Issues. Margo Horn, a Stanford history teacher who directs the Innovative Academic Courses program, called the class, with its 1,000 pages of reading, outside speakers and Spain, “one of the best uses of our program.”

“We wanted this to be a class where all perspectives were heard,” Kornblith said. “We wanted the students to think about and question these issues in a more in-depth way than society seems to be treating them today.”

Gifts and Tears

On the last night of the class, students gave Spain and Kornblith the gift of Stanford sweat shirts. Some students left in tears, so emotional were they that the course was ending.

“Definitely not your typical Stanford class,” sophomore Mark Oldman said, adding he may have learned more in the course than in any other he had taken.

Elliot Brown said his parents were “horrified” when he told them of his new teacher. “My mom was not happy. She asked, ‘Are you being careful?’ ”

As the last session ended Wednesday night, Brown, a senior, called it “the best class I have ever taken.” The class was especially important at Stanford where “so many people are from such a sheltered background.”

Spain’s message is direct: the bulk of California’s prison inmates will be released sometime, so people should care about their treatment when they are inside, “whether you are Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal.”

For him, he said, the solution was help from the outside and his own drive. Friends would visit, tell him about the world and urge him to stay out of trouble. He became an electrician and took almost enough college units for a two-year degree. More than 100 people, including several prison guards and officials, wrote letters to the Board of Prison Terms advocating his release.

Spain glibly recalls how, when inmates promised to look him up if they ever made it out to his neighborhood, he’d reply that if he saw them near his home, he would “call the cops.” He also recalls wondering why inmates would resort to crime after their release and “what was so horrible about the outside” that they couldn’t make it.

“I’d say to them, ‘Just let me have a shot at it. I’ll show you how it’s done,’ ” Spain said.

Spain was serving a life sentence at Soledad State Prison for the robbery-murder of a man in East Los Angeles when he became close to George Jackson, an inmate revolutionary who gained fame for his book, “Soledad Brother.” Spain can still recite passages of the book, but also says Jackson lacked an understanding of the world outside.

Smuggled Gun

Jackson, accused of killing a guard at Soledad, was transferred to San Quentin. Spain, though not implicated in the Soledad killing, also was moved to San Quentin. There, on Aug. 21, 1971, Jackson, using a smuggled gun, attempted to escape, a move that turned bloody. When it was over, three guards and Jackson had been shot to death.

Spain was convicted in 1976 of the murders of two guards. Although there was no evidence that he personally killed the guards, his conviction was based on his alleged involvement in Jackson’s escape conspiracy. Judge Henderson overturned that conviction in 1986 and ordered a new trial. Other so-called San Quentin Six defendants were acquitted or convicted of lesser charges.

Today, Spain says he owes a large debt to those who helped him win release, and vows not to let them down.

“A lot of people’s interests are riding on me,” Spain said, back from speaking to a gathering of drug counselors and mental health workers. “A lot of people went to bat for me, when history told them not to. I’m doing this for me, but I’m doing it for them, too.”