JUSTICE: Panthers Acquitted

In the numerology of protest, they were the New York 13: members of the Black Panther Party charged with conspiring to bomb police stations, department stores and railroad tracks, and to assassinate policemen. In the two years since a predawn police raid set off the long chain of legal maneuvering, numbers spiraled around them. The defendants, eleven men and two women, were charged with 30 offenses that could have brought each of them a total of 309 years in jail. Bail was set prohibitively high at $50,000 to $100,000—and 43 judges refused to reduce it. The trial lasted eight months and cost an estimated $2,000,000, which made it the longest and perhaps most expensive in New York State history.

Presiding Judge John Murtagh’s home was bombed during the pretrial hearings. Two defendants fled to Algeria when the trial was five months old. After all the months of disruption and acrimony, it took the jury just 90 minutes last week to find the defendants innocent of every charge.

Foreman James I. Fox, a black musician, spent 20 minutes answering the court clerk’s 156 queries on each specification of the indictment. Judge Murtagh had dismissed all but twelve of the counts against each defendant when he sent the case to the jury. Still, he left the basic prosecution case intact. Afterward, Juror Stephen Chaberski, a graduate student at Columbia University, explained the vote: “The government just did not prove its case.”

Motive and Intent. The prosecution had centered that case on the testimony of three police undercover agents, who swore that the Panthers conspired to bomb police stations and Manhattan stores. The agents were subjected to lengthy cross-examination by defense lawyers and evidently failed to persuade the jury that the plot ever passed beyond the theoretical stage.

Ironically, Judge Murtagh, whom the defendants repeatedly denounced in the courtroom, apparently influenced the outcome in the Panthers’ favor. Said Chaberski: “In his charge the judge made it perfectly clear about motive and intent. Motive, he explained, is what the defendants would like to do; intent is whether they really intended to do it. And the government did not prove intent.” The stunningly swift verdict came after a single written ballot on each charge.

After the verdict the defendants, their supporters and some of the men and women who had sat in judgment of them gathered for a victory celebration. At the party, Juror Frederick Hills expressed his dismay at the conspiracy statutes frequently invoked to prosecute dissenters and radicals. Said Hills: “It’s disgusting—a large lasso to bring in people for so many things.” Five of the defendants remained in jail because other charges were pending against them, but the others—with the exception of eight-months-pregnant Afeni Shakur, who was out on bail—were released. Some had been held from time to time at Manhattan’s Men’s House of Detention, known as the Tombs. Said Alex McKiever, now 19: “I was 17 when I came to the Tombs.”