A Shameful End

When the testimony was over, we argued the admissibility of the final scraps of evidence. Coghlan, Volini, and Kanter were absent from court. Witkowski argued endlessly for several days, giving absurd reasons for why clearly admissible evidence should be left out. On April 13 we found out why: he had been stalling while the defendants’ other lawyers had been writing motions to dismiss—two hundred pages worth asserting we had not presented enough evidence against any of the defendants to allow the jury to determine their liability. On that day, they gave us copies and told Perry they were ready to argue.

Perry’s response was, “Some of the defendants fired guns. I couldn’t with a straight face grant the motions in those cases, so this case has to go to the jury for some of the defendants.” He gave us a week to answer their motions.

“They’re in a hurry because the mayoral primary is coming up. They want Hanrahan exonerated before then,” Flint said over our third beer that night. Judge Romiti’s dismissal of Hanrahan’s criminal charges right before the state’s attorney’s election had always seemed rigged, and this looked all too familiar.

“How are we gonna answer their motions?” I asked. We didn’t have transcripts to dispute their statement of facts, and Linda Turner, our main typist, was out of town over Easter weekend. Besides, I was exhausted. Perry had said we would take a recess in April, and I was looking forward to the break. I’d hardly had time to take a walk outside for weeks. Maggie and I had planned a short weekend trip to Starved Rock, a park with scenic trails through narrow canyons, an hour and a half from Chicago.

“Let’s give Perry a sample of our handwriting,” Flint suggested.

“He’ll hate mine; that I’m sure of,” I responded with a slight smile. Court papers from lawyers were always typed, but we didn’t have the time or the typists. The defendants’ nine motions to dismiss cited over fifty cases. Attached were hundreds of pages of transcript excerpts to support their factual assertions. The standard on a motion to dismiss is whether the evidence, “taken in the light most favorable to the non-moving party” (our clients, in this instance), was sufficient for the jury to decide in our favor. The defendants argued from an interpretation of the evidence favorable to them, but it would take hundreds of hours for us to sift through the thirty-thousand-page trial transcript to refute their claims.

“We ain’t going nowhere,” I told Maggie when I got home later that evening. I showed her the three-inch-thick stack of motions the defendants had filed. She wasn’t surprised. She had learned to expect the worst.

The next morning Flint dared to ask Perry if we could have access to his copy of the transcript to respond to their motions and extra time to answer them. Christenbury replied haughtily, “Your Honor I grow weary of continually having to pay the price of the plaintiffs’ lack of diligence. They have a battery of lawyers to work on it, and there is absolutely no excuse for their now coming in and saying they need additional time. They have had ample time.”

I was seething and rose to answer, but Flint spoke first: “The battery of lawyers at the People’s Law Office are two lawyers who have been out of law school for two years working to pay our salaries. We are the other two lawyers. We have been in court fifteen months. We are facing the head of the Special Litigation Unit of the Justice Department; the head of the Civil Division of the Chicago office of the FBI, sometimes known as the U.S. Attorney’s Office; another attorney from the U.S. Attorney’s Office; and a full-time FBI agent, Larry Deaton—all paid by the day.

“We are facing Mr. Volini, paid $350,000 of the city of Chicago’s money, and Mr. Coghlan, special state’s attorney for Cook County, paid $50 an hour to the tune of $650,000; Mr. Witkowski; John Touhy as special corporation counsel spent three weeks writing this brief at $35 per hour; Mike Conneely, GIU cop assigned full time since May 1974; secretaries, Xeroxes, three copies of the transcript at $9.00 per page. We don’t have the transcript. We have to see it only during lunch times and court proceedings.”

Perry was not moved and refused to give us his transcript.

For the next five days, Flint and I sat at our conference table surrounded by our notes and the few transcripts we had managed to copy. We handwrote our answers to their motions. My handwriting was notoriously sloppy and my fast printing, which I did hour after hour for several days, was hardly better. I didn’t think Perry would read what we wrote, but I wanted to have a filed document refuting the defendants’ arguments. Jack Kerouac supposedly wrote On the Road in a single sitting, high on LSD. Flint and I wrote our hundred-plus page answer to their motions in five days with only coffee, cigarettes, and outrage to keep us going.

On Wednesday afternoon we filed the accumulation of legal-size, handwritten pages with the clerk and left copies at Perry’s chambers and with the defendants.

The next day we were in court opposing the defendants’ motions. They again claimed the prosecutors were immune, and they interpreted the evidence favorably to themselves to conclude the FBI was only passing on information and the raiders were merely executing a search warrant when they were attacked with Panther gunfire. They returned the fire in self-defense.

Flint responded by showing how the COINTELPRO-inspired defendants were on a course to destroy the Panthers and neutralize their leadership, and Fred Hampton in particular. They tried to get Fred murdered with the Fort hit letter and then, after two police officers were killed by an ex-Panther, they set up Hanrahan to do their dirty work. Both the bonus for O’Neal and Piper’s acknowledgement of the raid as a “success” were further proof of the FBI intention for the raid. He ended by answering Coghlan’s argument about us not proving “invidious discrimination,” required under the Civil Rights Act.

“Your Honor,” Flint said, “when I stood in the blood of Fred Hampton on December 4 as I helped to collect evidence because the police had left after tearing up the apartment, black people were walking through that apartment, and an older black woman, looking around, said, ‘It’s nothing but a northern lynching.’ And that is what it was, and if that is not invidious discrimination, I don’t know what is.”

I focused on the law. “Judge, I don’t understand why we are making such a big to-do over these motions today. They have all been pretty much ruled upon in the past by the Seventh Circuit, and yet we are back as though we hadn’t heard fifteen months of evidence.” I cited lengthy portions of the Seventh Circuit opinion reversing Perry’s earlier dismissal of our case on the same incorrect grounds the defendants were urging upon him again. I pointed out that a conspiracy does not require everyone knowing each other personally or what exact roles they would play. Citing the Supreme Court, I stated, “It is elementary that an unlawful conspiracy may be and often is formed without simultaneous action or agreement on the part of the conspirators.” Conspiracy law developed through drug cases was on our side. The importer did not have to know the distributor on the street to be in a conspiracy with him.

Christenbury asserted that the FBI was not in a conspiracy with Hanrahan or the raiders; COINTELPRO had nothing to do with the raid, as Hanrahan and the police didn’t even know about it.

Perry recessed at noon and announced he would rule later that day.

Flint and I were sitting in the black leather chairs and I was rocking back and forth when Perry came out from the side door at 4:00 P.M. I made a halfhearted effort to stand and then quickly resumed rocking. The artists from the media were focusing on Perry and sketching noiselessly on their giant pads. The defendants had alerted them to the imminent ruling. We had encouraged the Hamptons and Mrs. Clark and a few supporters to come to court.

“I have a very bad voice,” Perry began. “I am not going to attempt to read the orders. There are a number of motions.” The volume of typed orders in Perry’s hand indicated they must have been written before we submitted our answers.

Perry first denied our countermotions for directed verdicts against the shooters and denied our sanctions motion against the feds.

No surprises there. He’d never even given us the chance to argue the sanctions motion.

Perry cleared his throat. He denied the seven shooters’ motions to dismiss their individual counts and ordered us to proceed the following Monday with damages witnesses followed by the defense. He then dismissed the conspiracy count and ended, “The motion as to all other fifteen defendants is granted. The court now stands in recess.”

The little man in the black robe scurried off the bench. It took only fourteen minutes for him to gut our lawsuit, exonerating everyone except the seven police shooters. I sat there stunned, looking at

Flint, who looked similarly paralyzed in his chair. So much work, so much proof, and dismissed so summarily. No justice here, I thought. On the other side of the court Johnson, Piper, and Mitchell were shaking Kanter’s and Christenbury’s hands. They were all smiling as they picked up their papers to leave. Hanrahan didn’t smile, not even now, but all the other defendants who had been dismissed were patting each other on the back and thanking Coghlan and Volini.

I finally stood up and walked over and explained the dismissals as best I could to the Hamptons and Fannie Clark.

“He just ignored all that evidence,” Mrs. Clark said. “He didn’t care what Hanrahan and the FBI did to our sons.”

Iberia had withdrawn into that shell I’d seen before. Her expression was fixed in a mask of anger and determination.

“He just don’t wanna do right,” she finally said. That summed it up pretty well.

In spite of Perry’s ruling, Hanrahan finished a distant fifth in the mayoral primary the following Tuesday. Hanrahan had convinced few people besides Judge Perry that he was innocent.