Beaumont, for those unfamiliar, is a city in Southeastern Texas. It's known mostly for its quaint neighborhoods, its first-rate museums, and the affluent residents who frequent them. But Beaumont is also known for something a bit more distasteful. FCC Beaumont is a United States federal prison complex for male inmates. It consists of three prison facilities, one of which is USP Beaumont, a high-security prison. It is one of the most violent and corrupt prisons in the United States. Inmates there have dubbed the prison "Gladiator School." Others call it the "Thunderdome" or "Bloody Beaumont." Whatever they choose to call it, it's a bad place to be--and the government knows it. Up-to-date information on the crimes and violent incidents within USP Beaumont are difficult to find, and rarely give anything but the vaguest of details. Prison officials begrudgingly admit that there have been several brutal deaths at the prison but have only released details about two of them. Much of what we do know about the horrors within Beaumont we owe to the investigative reporting skills of one Leah Caldwell, a tenacious college student who wrote a horrifying and enlightening article for Prison Legal News.

Caldwell found that corruption and brutality among the prison staff was commonplace. The guards would pit inmates against each other, putting them in rec cages (recreational areas), and forcing them to fight--all while placing bets on the outcome. Beaumont also has the highest percentage of drug use and the highest drug misconduct rate in the entire Bureau of Prisons. In 2001, the year of one of the inmate deaths, there were thirty-one reported prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. There were twenty-five prisoner-on-staff incidents, while the numbers for staff-on-prisoner altercations weren't kept. That same year, a guard supervisor called Bryan Small was charged for allowing his staff members to violently assault prisoners. He was the only one to face any sort of discipline for the brutality. However, at least five guards have been indicted for possession of controlled substances within a prison, with intent to distribute.

You may be wondering how this relates to Shannon Agofsky.

Shannon was incarcerated at Beaumont not long after it first opened its doors. It was at Gladiator School where Shannon received his death sentence. In 2001, Shannon and a man named Luther Plant, an arsonist convicted of burning down a Texas nightclub, were placed in a rec cage together. Plant was a prison mule and a volatile drug addict, and it was well-known that he was rarely without a shiv. In fact, most inmates at Beaumont had makeshift knives and weapons, because they were so easy to find there. At the time of Plant's death, Beaumont was still a fairly new prison. Scraps of metal leftover from construction were easy to find, half-buried in dirt on the compound. Prisoners would pry pieces of metal off the bottoms of door frames or off their food trays. Knives and shivs were bought and sold as often as stamps and drugs.

On January 5th, 2001, Shannon and Plant were exercising separately in their rec cage. Witnesses said that they were both walking briskly back and forth across the 15-by-20 foot area. Every time they passed one another, Plant would mutter unintelligibly. All of a sudden, Plant lunged at Shannon and swung toward his face. Inmate Robert McKinn said that the way Plant was holding his hand made it look "like he had a fist pack or a knife." Shannon, a black belt in Hwa Rang Do, kicked Plant's feet out from underneath him and stomped on his throat and head. The retaliation lasted perhaps ten seconds. Shannon stopped before killing Plant, without any involvement from the guards. He walked away to the other side of the cage and waited for prison staff to arrive. Luther Plant was taken to Mid-Jefferson County Hospital and died two hours later from head trauma.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you, and I assume you would think it's insulting to your intelligence if I did. Luther Plant's death was brutal, bloody, and agonizing. It was a terrible way to die. He also brought it upon himself. Shannon acted out of instinct and self-preservation. Shannon said of the incident,

"People don't understand what it's like in here. I was young, barely a man, thrown into a maximum security prison, with absolutely no idea how to act. This lack of knowledge made things very hard for me, to say the least. I had to learn my way by trial and error, in an extremely unforgiving environment, with my only survival skill being my ability in martial arts. Were it not for those abilities, I would have certainly died.

"Over the years, as I tried to learn how to function in prison, I was punched, kicked, stomped, beaten with pipes, mop wringers, padlocks in socks, stabbed with shivs, cut with razor blades, doused in boiling water. Any and every form of violence that can be brought against a person has been brought against me. Yet I've never run away, never requested protective custody, never backed down, regardless of danger. You can't do that in prison, they'll eat you alive. I have refused to become the victim.

"At one point, after already having been involved in several violent situations, I was placed in a rec cage with a violent inmate, and I was attacked. After all was said and done, I was charged and convicted of 2 counts of murder, and given death sentences on both. Even so, you cannot call me a murderer. Not truthfully. I only acted in self-defense. I did what I had to do to survive in prison. Had I not done so, I could have been seriously injured or even killed myself, which is unacceptable. Because of those circumstances, I don't apologize for what happened. I do wish that it hadn't happened. I feel bitterly sad for the people who loved and cared about the man I killed. Yet I cannot and will not be sorry for doing whatever is necessary to ensure my own safety in prison."

Ten inmates saw the fight in the cages that day. Nine of them said that Plant attacked first, and that the incident was over in seconds. One of them, after being promised a reduced sentence and a transfer to a safer facility, testified for the State that Shannon attacked first. He later recanted his testimony. Of the nine that said Plant was the instigator, only three--for reasons I cannot fathom--were called upon by Shannon's Defense. A guard witnessed the last few seconds of the altercation from some distance away and immediately started filming. This video, along with the testimony of one inmate receiving favors from the State, somehow warranted not one, but two death sentences.

I wish I could place the blame squarely on the State. I wish I could say it was only because the prosecutors were underhanded and corrupt. But an equal blame lies with Shannon's poor counsel. The way they handled his case was nothing short of deplorable. They made no attempts to gather evidence of Luther Plant's criminal behaviors or past incidents while incarcerated. Though Shannon was indicted in August, no one came to speak to him or made any attempt to gather pertinent information until the end of November 2003. No witness interviews were conducted until 2004--and even then, only six of potential twenty-eight witnesses were contacted. Leads weren't followed up on, interviews weren't thorough, and witnesses who reached out were ignored.

Frank Early was one of the inmates ready and willing to testify. He even attempted to contact Shannon's counsel and was unsuccessful. When asked about his opinion of the incident, Early said:

"Because of the atmosphere at Beaumont, Shannon did what he had to do to stay alive. In the circumstances, Shannon had to assume Tootie [Plant's nickname] was armed. It doesn't matter who is bigger or taller. A knife is an equalizer."

Early also thought that Plant attacked Shannon in an attempt to "check-in"--an opinion most of the inmate witnesses shared. Checking-in is when an inmate instigates a situation that will get them sent to SHU or to another facility altogether. Inmates will do this to escape harm from a particular person or gang, or to escape their debts for drugs or favors. Charles Glave, another inmate who would have testified for Shannon, had been incarcerated with Plant previously at another facility. He described Plant as someone who "was doing everything you shouldn't do in prison." Plant made and sold knives on the prison yard; he was also a mule who facilitated the flow of marijuana and heroin throughout the prison. Glave knew that Plant owed a lot of money on the yard because he would buy drugs on credit. Plant would then commit some sort of infraction to get sent to the SHU, thus buying him more time to pay. Glave said he saw Plant do this multiple times at USP Lompoc. It was, he said, "a track record with Luther."

Another inmate, Scott Lawson, agreed with Glave. He even testified that Plant had been grumbling about Shannon in the days before the incident. Plant told Lawson that he was getting sick of Shannon and wanted to jump him. Lawson and inmate Robert Ecker had also heard Richard Ward, the inmate who testified for the State, laughing and saying that, "I cannot believe that Tootie swung on Shannon" after they were made to return to their cells.

Multiple doctors were willing to go on the record to say that Shannon's response was completely justifiable, given the circumstances--yet they were never called to testify. Dr. Lawson F. Berstein explained:

"Shannon Agofsky's conduct on January 5th, 2001 was due to an acute stress reaction...His reaction is properly characterized as a sheer survival response. Assuming Mr. Agofsky's response was triggered by the perceived aggression on the part of Mr. Plant, is it my opinion that Mr. Agofsky could not have formed the specific intent to kill and was not capable of premeditation in the short time frame described."

In fact, after hearing the evidence, the jury struggled with the question of intent and whether or not the killing was premeditated. What swayed them in the end was a quote from a letter, taken out of context and used unethically by the State.

Four months before the incident with Plant, Shannon was writing to his cousin about a common occurrence in USP Beaumont--the guards instigating altercations. Scott Lawson explained that the guards at Beaumont--and at most prisons--despise sex offenders as much as the other inmates do. Guards would identify sex offenders and snitches to other inmates and encourage them to "deal with them, by whatever means necessary." Sex offenders and snitches were frequently forced into the rec cages or locked into other inmates' cells in order to elicit a violent response from the regular prisoners. In the letter used against Shannon at trial, this was the scenario he was writing about. On several occasions, the guards had placed Shannon in close-quarter situations with child molesters. In his letter, Shannon recalled a child molester who had raped a disabled inmate several weeks before. He had beaten the man when he was given the opportunity, and wrote,

"All I do is work out, wait to leave, and hope the cops let me around some other scumbag so I can test out my hand."

The State presented only this line from the entire letter and used it as evidence of premeditation. It was enough to convince the jury that my friend deserved to die.

This was a difficult article for me to write. In fact, I had been dreading it. I put it off as long as I could because I worried that this part of Shannon's story would lose the support we have managed to rally so far. It is a grim and brutal story. It proves that Shannon is capable of quick, efficient, and indeed violent reaction. Shannon admits quite openly that he has beaten child killers and rapists in prison, even in the not-so-distant past. I have feared that this would destroy any sympathy that you may have felt for him, dear reader.

But I also said, from the beginning, that I would be honest. I would tell you everything that I am legally allowed to tell. Shannon is a criminal. Shannon has done vicious things. But I deeply and most sincerely believe that he has only acted as a man must act in prison. He has been courageous and completely calculated at protecting himself and those close to him in prison; he has operated according to the prison code-of-honor and placed himself in the highest--and safest--tier. Do I think Shannon is capable of great violence? Yes. But I also know--because I have experienced it countless times myself--that he is capable of great generosity and compassion. Just because a man has grown callous in prison, does that mean he is a cold-blooded killer? Just because a man was known to physically retaliate in the face of danger, does that mean he is a premeditated murderer? Or perhaps the most important question, the one that plagues me daily: How can we send a man to death row for a crime committed in prison, when he should never have been in prison at all?

Shannon's case affects me deeply. I have an intense empathy for the underdogs--the ones who haven't gotten their fair shot, the ones who can't seem to win for losing. Shannon has lost at every turn. Pegged for a crime he didn't commit, thrust into the violent world of high-security prisons as a naïve young man, and forced into dangerous situations almost daily. How can you expect a man in that situation to behave in any other way? The guards at Beaumont put him into a situation they knew was volatile, and potentially life-threatening. Shannon reacted in a way he felt necessary given the perceived level of danger. I am stunned that the death penalty was deemed the appropriate verdict--as stunned as I am at the absolute ineffectiveness of the defense counsel. The more I have researched Shannon's case, the more I have become convinced that he is some sort of warped human example of Murphy's Law. None of this should have happened. Somewhere, at some point, someone in the justice system should have stopped and said, "Wait a minute, none of this has been handled correctly." But no one did. That's the reason I write, to be the voice that should have been screaming for justice when this saga first began to unfold.

I know this is a lot of content to digest. Serious moral questions have been raised. When it comes to the subject of survival of the fittest, opinions are as various as they are numerous. But I ask you, dear reader, to consider two questions. To what lengths would you go in order to protect yourself from harm? Should Shannon Agofsky have even been in prison in the first place? I'd be lying if I said that I don't hope that you'll come to the same conclusions as I did and that you'll be joining me again next week for Part 5. Until then, I will leave you with a few words from Shannon:

"When I was initially convicted, I felt an intense and almost pathological need to explain to all and sundry that I was innocent, and to do so in great detail. I fought so hard to defend my name, but I have since found that to be pointless. The vast majority of people in the world simply do not care. It matters not one whit to them who is in prison, whether or not these individuals are actually guilty, and they are annoyed when forced to hear about such situations. Of those who do have an interest in my case, the ones who believe in my innocence tend to do so based on their knowledge of my code and character, not my lengthy explanations. Those who believe I am guilty will continue to do so regardless of evidence or the efficacy of any explanation. If you believe me, then I thank you. If not, I will not blame you. I am used to disbelief. But if the skeptics would just take the time to examine the facts and get to know me, I suspect that most of them would change their mind."