Eric King’s civil rights lawsuit alleges a pattern of abuse by Bureau of Prison guards across several facilities.
The Intercept, May 28, 2021
One morning in early 2018, Eric King was awoken at 5 a.m. and taken out of his solitary confinement cell by prison guards at the federal United States Penitentiary, McCreary, in Kentucky. King didn’t know the correctional officers by name, having been recently transferred to the facility for unexplained reasons.
That morning, the guards had something to tell King, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed this week on his behalf against the federal Bureau of Prisons and over 40 of its correctional officers. Members of a national white supremacist gang active in the prison had, the guards allegedly said, made threats on his life.
King is a known anti-fascist activist and anarchist. He is serving a 10-year federal sentence for throwing Molotov cocktails at an empty government office in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2014. He said throwing the Molotov cocktails, which he did not light, was in solidarity with the Ferguson rebellion that year, part of the Black liberation struggle against police violence.
