Michael Dorrough, who also goes by the chosen name Zaharibu, is a California prisoner who has been incarcerated since 1985 on a first-degree murder conviction carrying life without the possibility of parole. He spent roughly 27 years in solitary confinement before being moved to general population, and he has become a widely published advocate against prolonged isolation and life-without-parole sentencing. He maintains his innocence in the underlying case. He should not be confused with a different Michael Reed Dorrough convicted in a separate 1998 Compton shooting.
The 1985 Murder Conviction
Dorrough was convicted of first-degree murder in 1985 for a killing at the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Los Angeles. The jury found him guilty but ruled that the allegation of personal use of a weapon was “not true,” meaning the conviction rested on an aiding and abetting theory rather than on him being the shooter. He was sentenced to life without parole. According to Dorrough, some jurors later said they would have chosen a lesser sentence had one been available.
He has consistently challenged the case against him. Thomas Vandiver, who claimed to have witnessed the shooting and said Dorrough admitted to it, later acknowledged at a second penalty trial that he had lied in his testimony and had been intoxicated on marijuana and alcohol at the time of the incident. A second witness, Linda Toliver, said Dorrough confessed to her on March 6, 1985; Dorrough says he was in San Diego visiting friends that day, and he has affidavits from witnesses who could have corroborated his alibi but were never called.
His legal filings have alleged ineffective assistance of counsel for the failure to call alibi witnesses and to allow him to testify, abuse of discretion by the trial court in refusing to permit impeachment of the eyewitness, and errors in the aiding-and-abetting jury instructions. The conviction has survived review. Federal habeas petitions filed in the Eastern District of California in 2006 and 2007 were unsuccessful, and in October 2021 the California Supreme Court denied a habeas corpus petition he had filed.
More Than Two Decades in Solitary Confinement
In 1988, prison officials validated Dorrough as an affiliate of the Black Guerilla Family and placed him in the Security Housing Unit. He has rejected the gang designation throughout. He was held in SHU facilities at Pelican Bay State Prison and later Corcoran State Prison, under conditions that typically meant 22 to 24 hours a day locked in a small concrete cell with severely restricted phone calls, visits, and programming.
Officials pointed to his writings for Black nationalist publications and to his eulogy for a deceased inmate said to be a BGF member as supporting the validation. Dorrough and his longtime cellmate, J. Heshima Denham, identified instead as part of the New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism Collective Think Tank, a group of political thinkers, and argued their writing was being used as a pretext to keep them in isolation indefinitely.
By 2013 he had been diagnosed with severe depression and had documented mental health crises and self-harm among those around him. He described life in the SHU as a continuing assault on the psyche, worsened by two men sharing a windowless cell designed for one.
Leadership in the 2011 and 2013 Hunger Strikes
Dorrough took part in the mass hunger strikes that swept California prisons in 2011 and 2013 over the state’s use of prolonged solitary confinement. During the 2011 strike, which lasted three weeks, he lost at least 10 percent of his body weight. Denham lost consciousness during the same action.
When a larger strike launched on July 8, 2013, Dorrough was recognized as a leader of the protest at Corcoran. In a letter dated July 14, 2013, he wrote: “I don’t know if all this is gonna do us any good in the end, but this fight is worth the effort for sure.”
That visibility brought retaliation, according to his accounts and those of his advocates. Officials transferred Dorrough and Denham to a section of Corcoran housing gang dropouts and informants, a placement that could put validated affiliates at risk. He described the new location as a “black site,” reporting that officers placed mattresses in front of the cell door to enforce isolation and obstruct delivery of food and beverages. Earlier, on March 12, 2013, their cell had been subjected to a seven-hour raid in which officers confiscated or destroyed canteen items, artwork, and materials related to their human rights work. Their toilet was broken during the search and their hot water was cut off, reportedly for days. Advocates said the raid violated California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation policies against property damage during searches and the requirement that officers issue itemized receipts for seized items.
Release to General Population After the Ashker Settlement
The strikes helped produce a landmark legal settlement. In September 2015, the class action Ashker v. Governor of California ended with an agreement that reshaped California’s solitary confinement practices. The settlement barred the use of gang affiliation alone as a basis for SHU placement, tying placement instead to specific behavioral violations. Prisoners who had spent ten or more continuous years in the SHU were generally to be released immediately to a general population setting. A two-year step-down program was created for others, and a five-year cap was placed on involuntary SHU confinement at Pelican Bay.
Dorrough, who had been held in the SHU continuously since 1988, fell within the ten-year rule. By 2019 he was housed at Solano State Prison in general population, after roughly 27 years in isolation. Enforcement of the Ashker settlement remained contested, with courts extending monitoring after finding ongoing due process violations, including the fabrication of confidential information and reliance on outdated gang validations.
Writing, Radio, and Advocacy
At Solano, Dorrough joined “Uncuffed,” a radio training program run by KALW public radio with incarcerated men. The program, supported by the California Arts Council with funding from CDCR, produces content that is fact-checked and approved by a prison information officer before broadcast. He shared his story of more than two decades in isolation in a 2019 segment.
In June 2021 he wrote an opinion piece for Common Dreams titled “Putting an End to Extreme Sentencing,” calling his life-without-parole sentence, then in its 36th year, “the equivalent of a slow death.” He argued that such sentences deny the possibility of redemption and damage families and communities. He urged the California legislature and CDCR to invest in personal development programming, house prisoners closer to their families, raise pay for incarcerated workers, and provide technological training. He also called for expanding parole boards to include community members and independent mental health professionals, and for removing politics from release decisions. He pointed to the M.A.N.U.P. program at Solano as an example of effective programming.
His writing has also appeared in the San Francisco Bay View, Silicon Valley De-Bug, and In Case of Innocence, on topics ranging from the impact of LWOP sentencing to Governor Newsom’s death penalty moratorium. He maintains a personal website under the name Zaharibu that hosts legal documents from his case, including defense and prosecution closing arguments, alibi declarations, and his own sentencing statement. In September 2019 he participated in a Los Angeles strategy session organized by the DROP LWOP campaign, a coalition working to end life-without-parole sentencing in California.
A Different Michael Reed Dorrough: The 1998 Compton Case
A separate individual with the same name was involved in a deadly shootout on May 29, 1998, at Rob’s Car Wash in Compton. That case, which arose from a dispute over an unpaid drug debt, resulted in the deaths of Orlando Anderson, Gerry Stone, and Michael Stone. Anderson had been identified by police as a lead suspect in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur, though no direct evidence had linked him to that crime. That Michael Reed Dorrough, 24 at the time and identified by prosecutors as a member of the Southside Crips, was convicted of triple murder on October 6, 1999, and sentenced to three life terms without parole plus 49 years under California’s drive-by shooting statute. He is not the Michael Dorrough who writes as Zaharibu and whose 1985 Los Angeles conviction is described above.