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WILKES-BARRE — Even with five riot-gear clad correctional officers outside his cell, SCI Dallas inmate Anthony Locke refused to comply with a lieutenant’s orders to surrender of his own accord, a video shows.
“I respect y’all doing what you got to do,” Locke can be heard saying.
Attorneys played the video Monday during the first day of Locke’s bench trial before Luzerne County Judge Lesa S. Gelb.
Locke, 36, faces one count of riot stemming from an incident in late April 2010 in which he and several other inmates — known to supporters as the “Dallas 6” — covered the windows of their prison cells in State Correctional Institution Dallas’s restrictive housing unit.
The inmates say they were protesting authority abuses and retaliatory action by prison staff.
After briefly engaging Lt. David Mosier, the video shows, Locke retreated behind a mattress which he held in front of him in a defensive pose. Mosier in the clip orders Locke repeatedly to submit to a strip search and allow himself to be handcuffed, issuing the command several times — including a number of times after providing a “final” warning.
After a few minutes of persistent refusal from Locke, correctional officers gain entry to the cell and forcibly extract him.
Subdued within seconds, Locke can be heard yelling, “My arm’s broke. It’s broke.”
Two other videos were also played during the testimony of SCI Dallas Sgt. Donald Buck, who operated the camera in each instance.
Buck testified that upon making his early morning rounds of the restricted housing unit on April 29, he noticed that six or seven cell windows in the unit’s second floor had been covered. He said the inmates inside the cells refused orders to remove the covers from the windows.
In the first video played, Buck walks the cell block, stops for a moment outside each of seven cells — each with its window covered with a blanket or orange jumpsuit — and orders each inmate twice to remove the covering from his window. Upon reaching the end of the hall, he turns around and repeats his order to each inmate once more.
No discernible response from the inmates can be heard during the video.
In a second video, Buck again walks the hall, this time accompanied by a prison psychologist who asks the prisoners to remove the articles covering the windows. The inmates again refuse to remove the coverings.
Defense attorney Ernie Preate pointed out on cross examination that Locke’s window covering changes from the first to second video — first a jumpsuit, then a blanket. In the video showing Locke’s extraction, Locke had uncovered his window.
A tempestuous Preate took issue with officers extracting his client despite removal of the covering, especially in light of another inmate being removed without a five-man extraction team after uncovering his own window.
Mozier — who was present for several extractions — testified that the other inmate left his cell voluntarily, while Locke continually refused.
Prison policy forbids inmates from covering their cell windows, Mozier said, and because the inmates did so on April 29, they had to be removed from their cells, searched and relocated to another for the safety of both inmates and correctional officers.
Preate, who engaged both of the day’s witnesses in lengthy, combative cross examination said he was not finished questioning Mozier at day’s end. The lieutenant is expected to return to the stand when trial resumes this morning.
Locke was sentenced in 2003 to serve 10 to 20 years on a charge of witness intimidation, according to online court records. The same records indicate Locke was charged in Philadelphia in 2002 with attempted murder and several related offenses, though the disposition of that case was unknown Monday.