DOUBLE AMPUTEE BEATEN, TORTURED AND TERRORIZED FOR OVER A DECADE IN VIRGINIA PRISONS (2025) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

The inhumanity of Virginia’s prisons knows no limits. The experiences of Neil Lyness aka Turbo proves the case. Neil is a double-amputee who lost his left arm and left leg in a motorcycle accident. He’s been confined since 2012, where he spent 3 years in a Va Beach jail before being transferred into the Va prison system. His first two years in jail were spent in solitary confinement because jail officials refused to accommodate his needs as a disabled person. His treatments in Va’s prisons, however, have been far worse.

Neil began his prison time in minimum security facilities, where he should have remained. But instead, he was targeted with continued abuses as his security level shot up and he was repeatedly transferred, until ultimately he found himself at Va’s notorious supermax, Red Onion State Prison. At each subsequent facility, he was abused.

His first stop was Lunenburg Correctional Center. From there he went to St Brides, where 3 guards surrounded him on an outside boulevard, lifted his wheelchair, dumped him onto the pavement, and beat him. When his mother, Rhonda Lyness pressed charges for the assault, his security level was was increased and he was moved to a prison in Powhatan County, Va, where mistreatment continued and his security level was enhanced yet again.

He was next transferred to Va’s notorious maximum security River North Correctional Center, and from there to Red Onion in 2024.

At each stop Neil was flooded with trumped up disciplinary infractions and suffered physical abuses and medical neglect, as his health deteriorated and his mother agonized over the imminent danger his life was in at the hands of those charged with protecting him. His visitation and telephone rights were stripped away for years – Rhonda hasn’t seen her son for 2-3 years. For the mere act of painting decorations on the back of his wheelchair, which officials washed right off, Neil was given an infraction for destroying property and maliciously fined $5000 in restitution for the full costs of the wheelchair.

In latter 2024, during the same period that numerous prisoners set themselves on fire at Red Onion in desperate efforts to be transferred away from its inhumane conditions, Red Onion guards took Neil’s prosthetics, beat him, and strapped him to a steel bedframe in an isolation cell for several days, where he was left to urinate and defecate on himself, as has been done to countless prisoners at Red Onion for decades.

Only because of Rhonda’s unrelenting persistence in advocating her son’s cause, as she added her voice to the prisoner advocacy group UPROAR (1), was Neil recently interstate transferred to the another state prison system, where she finally got to talk to him.

A man of 6’4″, Neil’s weight dropped in Va custody from 200 lbs to a mere 154 lbs.

With him now in another state, both Neil and Rhonda are relieved for the first time in years of living in constant terror of him being killed by Va guards. And although HE is in a safer place now, multitudes of prisoners and their loved one continue to live in fear of their own imminent violent death at the hands of Va guards, which UPROAR continues to challenge and protest. Join us! Support us!

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!

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Endnotes:

1. UPROAR is an acronym for Uniting Prisoners’ Relatives Organizing Against Repression.