Biography
Linda Sue Evans was an antiwar and anti-imperialist organizer associated with Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground and later underground networks. She was arrested with Marilyn Buck on May 11, 1985. Her federal imprisonment involved separate New York firearms and harboring prosecutions, an Eastern District of Louisiana firearms prosecution, and a later District of Columbia government-property conspiracy prosecution. The Louisiana sentence was reduced on appeal; the combined consecutive sentences ultimately totaled forty years. President Clinton commuted that aggregate sentence on January 20, 2001. The Bureau of Prisons records her as not in federal custody as of that same date. After prison she continued advocacy around incarceration and prisoners' rights.
The demonstration report prints a prison solidarity message identifying Linda Evans at New York Metropolitan Correctional Center. This is evidence of the institution at the time of the April 1986 report; it supplies no exact transfer day and does not change a later or earlier institution in the existing case. Source: Report on the Marion/Lexington demonstration, April 19, 1986, PDF page 21. https://freedomarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/3.report.demo_.4.19.1986.pdf#page=21
Federal custody dates and separate judgments clarified
The original Fifth Circuit opinion, 848 F.2d 1352, dates Evans's arrest May 11, 1985 and distinguishes the Louisiana indictment, trial and March 20, 1987 verdict. That verdict is not the sentencing date. The Justice Department's official commutation record separately lists New York sentences November 21, 1985 and July 10, 1986, the Eastern Louisiana sentence May 20, 1987 as modified December 8, 1988, and the District of Columbia sentence December 6, 1990. Together the modified consecutive sentences totaled forty years.
The official Bureau of Prisons locator, searched by public register number 19973-054, identifies Linda Sue Evans and records that she was not in BOP custody as of January 20, 2001, independently corroborating the custody endpoint rather than merely assuming release from the commutation date. The pre-hearing memorandum preserved by the Clinton Presidential Library identifies the same register number and describes more than fourteen years in prison approaching the July 1999 hearing; its prosecution history gives the May 11 arrest. This aggregate custody interval includes pretrial detention and is counted once. The credit-adjusted commuted term of twenty-five years, eight months and eleven days is not a statement that Evans physically served twenty-five years.
Earlier 1970 arrest report
An Associated Press wire-photo caption dated April 15, 1970, reproduced as item 44 in Bay Leaf Books’ November 2015 press-photo catalogue, identifies Linda Evans, 22, among three people whose arrests the FBI had announced in New York. It says she was sought on charges arising from the October 1969 Chicago riots. The announcement and photograph date do not establish her exact arrest or jail-admission day, time served, or discharge day. This earlier prosecution is distinct from the federal custody beginning in May 1985 and is not added to that duration.
Original wire-photo caption reproduced on catalogue page 15, item 44
The contributor biography in Sinister Wisdom 61 identifies Linda Evans as a founding member of Pleasanton AIDS Counseling and Education (PACE), an inmate peer-counseling program, and the Council Against Racism.
Her 1999 parole memorandum reports a 1996 bachelor’s degree and ongoing master’s study at California State University–Dominguez Hills. It quotes Judge Martin Feldman’s May 13, 1996 letter supporting parole.
Evans’s parole memorandum describes eighty actual days in segregation following a disputed 1997 disciplinary finding, despite a thirty-day sanction, and fourteen months without visiting privileges. The account attributes the extended segregation to her court challenge; these days were within her existing imprisonment.
The Justice Department’s 1985 annual report dates Evans’s New York felon-in-possession verdict to October 11 and her separate Louisiana arraignment to October 17, 1985.
