the prisoners who controlled a large yard where they held guards and prison workers as hostages. Steel also wanted to protect a client there, William A. "Tony" Maynard, a friend of the writers, James Baldwin and William Styron who was serving a manslaughter sentence Steel would later get overturned. At Attica, the observers soon realized that it was not only their job to observe, but to try to negotiate a settlement, which would help resolve some of their complaints ‒ including harsh treatment, bad food, poor medical care, frequent use of solitary confinement and lack of representations at prison hearings. While the prison yard was still in the hands of more than 800 prisoners and their hostage guards and workers, Steel obtained an agreement that the prisoners would not be charged with any property related crimes. Reflecting on the legacy of Attica in a 2016 article in the Nation, Steel wrote that the carnage due to the prison yard attack ordered by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller did not lead to reform. “Federal law also turned repressive over the years, with much higher mandatory minimum sentences, especially for the drug crimes involving persons of color, and Congress significantly limited the circumstances in which the federal courts could intervene to require remedies for prison conditions which violated the constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.” Steel also discussed his experience in the Academy Award nominated documentary Attica (2021). Hurricane Carter and John Artis In 1973, Steel, with his co-lead counsel, Myron Beldock, began a twelve-year struggle, working without pay, to overturn the convictions of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis who had been convicted for the murder of three people at a Patterson, N.J. bar in 1966. The case drew national attention through Carter’s 1974 biography, “The Sixteenth Round,” and Bob Dylan's 1976 song Hurricane. The New Jersey Supreme Court overturned their conviction in 1976, after two key witnesses recanted their testimony. But they were convicted at a retrial in which the prosecutor added an unsupported claim that their motive was racial revenge. In response to a writ of habeas corpus filed by Steel, Beldock and Leon Friedman, U.S. District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin overturned their convictions in 1985, ruling that that the cases had rested on “an appeal to racism rather than reason” and “concealment rather than disclosure”. In 2000, Steel wrote a commentary in the Los