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Prisons:3 8/15/07 3:34 PM Page 11 onto Life A PRISONS. WITH ALL THE SUFFERING, NEGLECT, AND FIGHTING THEY E DESPITE THE PRISON MEDICAL SYSTEM, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. N By Erin FitzGerald ikki is a woman not easily fazed. But tonight, at the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, her normally steady voice will shake. Nikki will tell a group of high school students about her 28 years of imprisonment for the crime of murder. She'll describe being strip-searched and shamed by prison guards. She'll describe a dangerous lack of medical care for California's prison elderly, and the neglect she experienced first hand. And she'll speak about the crime that landed her there: In 1976, on the way to a family reunion, the man whom then-26-year-old Nikki was traveling with pulled a gun on another man and ordered Nikki to tie him up, then shot the man three times. Nikki was tried and convicted under the California felony murder rule, under which people can be charged with murder if they're involved in a crime in which someone dies even if they did not physically kill anyone. Nikki received a seven year-to-life sentence. Nikki, 59, now lives with her friend Pat, 57, whom she roomed with for part of her time in prison. The two women were paroled in 2004 and 2005, respectively, and share a common purpose on the outside: illuminating medical neglect in California's prisons. In 2001 the Plata case (see sidebar), filed by the advocacy group Prison Law Office, exposed the medical negligence in California prisons to public scrutiny and forced U.S. Federal District Court Judge Thelton Henderson in 2006 to appoint Robert Sillen as receiver to oversee California's failing prison healthcare system. What had long been a secret history of the prison establishment was revealed in shocking detail, prompting Henderson to call the medical care in California prisons "broken beyond repair." W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G REGISTERED NURSE 11