On November 12, 1970, Chicago newspaper headlines described an early morning shootout between the Panthers and the local police in Carbondale, Illinois, at a house the Panthers rented. Amazingly, no one was killed, although the confrontation was reported to have lasted several hours. Bullets struck two Panthers and one police officer. Neighbors, awakened by the gunfire, came out and urged the police to stop firing, and a truce was arranged. Four Panthers were arrested inside, and two some distance away. All were charged with multiple counts of attempted murder and were being held on one-hundred-thousand-dollar bond.
Because we had come to be accepted as the “Panther lawyers,” Bobby Rush asked PLO to go to Carbondale to represent the men arrested. Their families had contacted Chicago lawyers, and they were asking twenty-five thousand dollars apiece to represent the defendants. They didn’t have that kind of money.
“Anyone able to go to Carbondale?” Dennis asked at the impromptu meeting put together at the front of the office after Rush’s call.
Susan Jordan said she wanted to go, but she and Jo-Anne Wolfson were preparing their defense for their Stateville prisoner client.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Me too,” added Flint, who was taking the semester off from law school.
Courtney Esposito said she would go also.
To my surprise and delight, Michael Deutsch said he’d help with the trial. We were hoping he would join PLO, and he had started attending our office meetings. He had been an academic standout at the University of Illinois, as well as at Northwestern Law School, where he was on the law review. When he graduated in 1969, he had taken the prestigious position of clerking for Seventh Circuit Justice Otto Kerner, the former Illinois governor.
Moved by the tumultuous events of 1969 and 1970, Michael became more interested in PLO’s work than rising in the professional or academic world. He is one of the most incisive thinkers I’ve ever known. My dad used to say the most important thing in law is determining what is relevant. Michael does this as quickly as any lawyer I’ve met. Flint and I immediately accepted Michael’s offer to help at trial.
Among the three of us I had the most experience even though I was only three years out of law school and had only one felony trial under my belt. I had no idea what the courtroom atmosphere in southern Illinois would be like.
I asked my partners what we should charge. I was the most hard-nosed about finances. For Dennis, money was an afterthought, if considered at all. We decided we would offer to represent everyone for a total of ten thousand dollars. We had never taken money for defending the survivors of the December 4 raid, but we were often covering five cases a day per lawyer, in different courthouses around Cook County, just to pay the rent and our three-hundred-dollars-per-month salaries.
Two days later, Flint, Courtney, and I drove to Carbondale in southern Illinois. It was closer to Mississippi than Chicago, so I anticipated a very racist environment. In Cairo (pronounced Kayro), Illinois, fifty miles south of Carbondale, white supremacists had been driving around the black housing project shooting into it nightly. However, we found Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, less like the Old South than we expected. Most of the students were from the Chicago area.
Our first stop was the Panther office located in an unheated storefront at the edge of the small black community. I introduced myself to Jimmy Brewton, an intelligent former student who had started the Carbondale Panther chapter, and Paul Atwood, a white guy in overalls in his early twenties. Paul was missing his right forefinger; I later learned he had cut off his “trigger” finger to avoid being drafted for Vietnam.
They offered to walk with us the three blocks to the Panther house. The neighborhood consisted of two-story wood-frame houses in reasonably good condition. They reminded me of neighborhoods in Atlanta where even the poorest blacks owned their own homes. The
Panther house was also two stories, with windows on all sides of the second floor. I saw bullet holes in the glass panes of some of them. I also saw the outlines of sandbags above the window frames. Paul said they had been put there weeks before the shootout.
“That’s where the Panthers were defending themselves,” Jimmy said, pointing to the second floor. “And the cops were spread out behind their squad cars and those trees.”
A white-haired black man in work clothes came out of his house and asked who we were.
“We’re lawyers from Chicago, who may be representing the Panthers,” I answered. “Did you see the shootout?”
“Part of it,” he replied. “I was sleeping when shots woke me up. I looked out and saw all these cops running around in the dark with guns. I thought they were going to kill us. I didn’t know what was going on. I grabbed my shotgun and looked outside from behind my curtain.”
“Did you see who started it?” Courtney asked. “Did you hear the police give any orders over bullhorns before the shooting started?”
“No, first thing I remember hearing was shots from around my house and then some shots from this house right here, where those Panther boys stayed.”
“Would you be willing to testify at a trial?” Flint asked.
“Sure. I don’t want the police coming in here shooting,” he said, angrily. “Some kids could end up getting killed.” We had found our first witness.
Later that afternoon, Flint, Courtney, and I went to see the men in custody at the Murphysboro jail, fifteen miles from Carbondale. The sheriff let Flint in as a law student, but not Courtney, even though I told them she was our paralegal.
An hour later Flint and I were led to a small dingy room with a card table and a couple of chairs. We sat down. After a few minutes, four men were brought in. We introduced ourselves, shook hands, and stood around the table, a little awkwardly.
The men looked haggard and exhausted after three days in jail. Three of them were SIU students from Chicago. In the newspaper accounts the authorities claimed the shootout had started when the police followed a burglary suspect to the house. The police said when they surrounded the house and ordered the occupants out, the Panthers started firing.
The most vocal of the men in custody was Leonard Thomas, dark skinned and handsome, with a finely featured face and horn-rimmed glasses. Even though his clothes were ruffled, he looked as if he would be more at home in a classroom than firing a rifle.
“It was a real firefight, but they started it,” Leonard said. “Bullets were flying everywhere. I don’t know why nobody got killed.”
“‘Cause we were prepared to defend ourselves,” Milton Boyd (nicknamed Houseman) jumped in. He was tall and slender, with very dark skin and cheeks that pumped in and out when he talked. “We had our place barricaded. We weren’t going to be ambushed and killed in our beds like the brothers in Chicago.”
“Most of us were asleep when somebody from the front yelled that the police were surrounding the house. We heard shots and we went to our battle stations,” Leonard added.
We later learned that Elbert Simon, the black postmaster general of Carbondale, had entered the Panther house and convinced the Panthers to surrender after he received assurances from the police that they would not fire as the Panthers came out.
The men in custody wanted to know more about us. I explained that we represented the Panthers in Chicago, including the Hampton family, and we had been asked by Bobby Rush to help them. They looked skeptical. We were dressed in jeans and looked more like hippies than lawyers, with Flint’s ponytail and my Afro. They thanked us for coming down, but I sensed we would have to prove our merits in court.
“How about bail?” Leonard asked. “If you get us out, we can earn money and pay you without burdening our parents.”
This was not the type of agreement most criminal lawyers relished. They wanted cash up front. Sometimes we did too, but we weren’t going make them sit in jail. Getting your client out on bond is the first, and often most critical, step in a criminal case. With a client out of jail, there’s no pressure to go to trial quickly. Generally the defendant benefits from postponing the trial, particularly when there is a lot of publicity around the event that led to the arrest. Clients can assist in finding witnesses, working out the necessary defense, and preparing courtroom testimony. Also, it makes a much better impression on the judge and jury for your client to be free. Not only can he go to and from court without a marshal escorting him, but the jury knows he has been trusted enough to be released and is voluntarily appearing for trial. Unless we got the bond lowered, these defendants would be in custody at the time of trial, several months away. Because they were Panthers, getting the bond reduced would be difficult. This was the test for the defendants of whether we could deliver.
The bond hearing took place in Murphysboro in the regular courtroom in the old courthouse, located in the middle of the town square. Flint and I sat down at the counsel table in the empty, cavernous, woodpaneled courtroom.
Richard Richmond, the prosecutor, arrived shortly thereafter. He was a stocky but handsome man in his late thirties who came from a prominent local family. He walked over, introduced himself, and shook our hands. He was friendlier than I had anticipated. The judge, who arrived shortly thereafter, was less cordial.
The defendants were led into the courtroom shackled hand and foot. I stood up. “Your Honor, it’s demeaning for the defendants to be brought into court like this. I move to have the marshals remove their handcuffs and leg chains.” The judge looked at Richmond, who said he had no objection. The judge looked annoyed that Richmond had acceded to our request but begrudgingly ordered the sheriff to remove the handcuffs and leg chains.
I stood up and explained that the defendants had no criminal backgrounds, were students who came from working- and middle-class families, and had not sought this confrontation with the police. At worst, some of them had defended themselves when the police attacked. Richmond opposed our motion to reduce bond based on the length of the standoff, the number of shots fired, and the danger to the officers. To my surprise, he didn’t focus on the defendants being Black Panthers.
The judge quickly ruled: “Motion to reduce bond is denied.”
Back in our tiny visiting room in the jail, our clients were understandably upset. They were facing six months or more in custody before trial.
“We’re not giving up,” I said. “There was too much pressure on this judge for him to let you guys out.”
“We’ll appeal his decision,” Flint rejoined. “I’ve already started drafting a petition to the Supreme Court to ask for a bond reduction.”
We called some local activists together to set up a defense committee. Somebody had a photograph of the six Panthers chained together in handcuffs and leg restraints after the shootout. The men in the photo looked like slaves being led to a slave ship or an auction block. The photo with the words “Free the Carbondale Six, Stop the Railroad” in bold letters under it became the official poster of the defense committee.
Flint and I spent two days drafting and filing the appeal. Within a couple days, Justice Goldenhersh’s clerk called to say the Illinois Supreme Court justice set a hearing at his Mount Vernon office the following Monday. He had a reputation for being open-minded, even liberal.
The next Monday morning Flint and I were called into Justice Goldenhersh’s law office along with the prosecutor, Dick Richmond. Flint introduced himself as a third-year law student and obtained permission to participate in the hearing. I repeated my arguments from the earlier bail hearing but emphasized that the defendants were or had been college students with firm family roots in their communities. They were not going to break contact with their families and flee. I argued that Illinois law includes the presumption of innocence before trial, which requires releasing defendants on bail unless the state demonstrates they are a danger of flight or a risk to the community, which these defendants were not. Flint cited cases to support me.
“Do you agree with their premise, Mr. Richmond?” Justice Goldenhersh asked.
Richmond said that he accepted our formulation of the law and he didn’t argue against bail very forcefully. Here was a prosecutor unlike those in Cook County’s criminal courts: a prosecutor with a conscience.
Shortly after we left the judge, his clerk brought out his order. I glanced at the bottom line: “The Appellants Motion to Reduce Bond is hereby granted. Bond is set at $10,000.” Our clients would be released as soon as their families put up 10 percent, or one thousand dollars.
Flint and I were exuberant. “Let’s get out of here before he changes his mind,” I said.
At the Jackson County Jail we reported the good news. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the smile when you tell a client in jail he or she is going home.
“You guys really did it,” Leonard said.
“You the one,” Houseman joined in, giving us a high five.
James Holley, nicknamed Blood, was short and stocky. He had hardly said a word on any of our earlier visits. This time he gave us our biggest compliment: “You guys are our trial team.”