Forest C. Hammond-Martin

In the year 2013, a female citizen who lives over seas in the Netherlands, saw that I had written a book about Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. She was a spear head of a group of people fighting for the freedom of one, VINCENT A. SIMMONS. He was a black male convicted in Marksville, Louisiana in 1977 and sentenced to 100 years for the alleged rape of two twin white girls. The woman from the Netherland contact Pelican Publishing Company and obtained my email address. She contact me and asked did I still practice post-conviction law since I did so when I was in Angola in the 1970's, and if so would I mind taking a look at the case file of Vincent Simmons. I remembered Vincent from when I was in Angola, and told the lady yes I would take a look at his file. She sent it, but did not tell me the file was 2,700 pages thick! I, nevertheless, read each line and red-lined and highlighted the entire pertinent issues in the file and turned my house into a legal aid office. At that time Vincent had been barred from filing any post-conviction petitions in court because he had filed too man successive petitions and could not get back in court. To make a long story short, visited him in Angola several times and I got his POA and drafted pleadings that got him back in court. He was freed on February 14, 2022 after serving 44-years in Angola. The Judge ruled he did not get a fair trial and his Brady rights were violated by the District Attorney's office. Today, Vincent A. Simmons is a Free Man. Halleluyah!

Forest Clark Hammond-Martin, Sr., AKA/Saint.

My mother named all my siblings after Roman Catholic Saints and prayed before jars of candle wax on a mantle. when I was 8 I asked her who were those people on them jars. She answered as she pointed at the various jars, saying "Saints I named my children after." I was panning the mantle searching for my name sake candle jar and she didn't point to one I was named after. I asked her instantly, "Well, Mommy, where's Saint Forest at, then?" She exploded with laughter and nicknamed me the Amazing Saint after the Amazing Spiderman comic books she bought me. In  Penitentiary everybody in population for the most part go by nicknames. I was. The Saint. Some called me the Lawyer, or the Inmate Lawyer. Deputy wardens in the prison administration called me "The S'mott'Niggah."

• Writing short stories
• Mentoring youth
• Photography/motion picture/still image shots
• Love to cook, bake, bar-b-que and watch movies

I have a Gold Seal Certification.

PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL

During the hard times in the late 1960's and early 1970's, a new breed of inmates began to populate the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The old stupid and ignorant convict rapidly became a thing of the past. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Johnson v. Avery,  393 U.S. 483 (1969), which gave a license to inmate lawyers to help other inmates with their legal needs - filing criminal post-conviction pleadings and civil law suits in the state and federal courts, and attacking the depraved conditions in Angola. The Department of Correction didn't give the legal aid office nothing sufficient to assist the general population in the protection of their constitutional rights, but despite all that, the convicts would find a way to prevail and over come and made anything out of nothing. Yahweh is spirit and spirit is invisible, but it does exist. We know it's there, present and "For in Him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." (Acts 17:28). So we live right within Spirit. We always knew He was there providing for us and making a way-out where we didn't see no-way-out like the sudden parting waters of the Red Sea situation delivering the Children of Israel and destroying Pharoah and his 600 Egyptians Soldiers pursuing them. To the world, that old God in the Holy Bible -the God of the Children of Israel  - that old Yahweh is ignored as "NOTHING!" So each day we walk with faith and remind ourselves that "We have done so much, for so long with so little, we are now capable of doing anything with NOTHING. That nothing is YHWH who is everything.