In the summer of 1971 the Center for Constitutional Rights was helping us answer Hanrahan’s motions to dismiss. They had generously provided us with assistance from Bill Bender, one of their most skilled lawyers. Hanrahan’s lawyers took the position that as a prosecutor, Hanrahan had absolute immunity for any actions he took. We argued that executing a police raid was a police function, not a prosecutorial one, thus Hanrahan was not entitled to complete immunity. The law was on our side, but out of deference to Coghlan and Volini, Judge Perry wasn’t.
More briefs and memos were still due on both the immunity and conspiracy issues as Flint, Michael, and I went to trial in August in the Carbondale Panther case. Judge Perry stopped our discovery while the special grand jury considered criminal charges against Hanrahan. There was nothing to do but answer their motions and wait for Perry to rule.
The Carbondale Six became the Carbondale Three after the prosecutor decided to indict the Panthers separately. The first trial would be for Leonard Thomas, Milton “Houseman” Boyd, and James “Blood” Holley, all of whom were arrested inside the house after the shootout.
Though we feared the Carbondale Panthers would not get a fair trial in front of the humorless and prosecution-oriented Judge Prosser, we were hopeful about the jury. Michael and Flint had opened a PLO branch in Carbondale that spring, and had become familiar with the jury pools there. A lot of SIU students, faculty, and ex-students were on the registered voting lists in Jackson County, along with a lot of weed-smoking folks who didn’t love the police. We wanted a young jury, which in that period meant an iconoclastic jury.
Our understanding of the law was that the prosecutor had to prove that an individual defendant fired at a specific police officer with the intent to kill him in order to prove any of the seven attempted murder charges pending against each defendant. It would be nearly impossible for any of the police officers to identify which individuals had fired at him. If we could pick a jury that would hold the prosecution to its legal burden, we thought we had a good chance of winning.
For jury selection, the spectator section of the courtroom was packed with supporters, mostly current or recent college students or those who had taken a brief respite from the university. The Carbondale Six Defense Committee, which comprised primarily student activists and was formed shortly after the shootout, had done its work. It makes a huge difference for a jury to see there are people in court who care about the defendants on trial. This is particularly true in a political case, where the prosecution invariably tries to show the defendants to be on the fringe.
As the trial began, our clients were dressed in sports clothes, and Michael and I had on court suits. Flint was wearing a tan sport jacket and a red, curly-haired wig to cover his shoulder-length reddish-brown hair. From a certain angle he looked a little clownish. The wig did not quite fit and had an orange tint.
Eleven of the twelve white jurors selected were in their twenties. In 1971, age was a strong indicator of one’s sympathy toward change and to political movements in general. We assumed most of the jurors would relate to our youthful and iconoclastic style and exuberance, not to mention our suspicion of the police.
Michael made our opening statement; it was the first time he’d ever spoken to a jury. Nervous at first, he quickly got into the rhythm, presenting the case from the defendants’ perspective. They woke up in the early morning hours to flashes and the sounds of gunshots coming from the darkness. Without indicating whom, he acknowledged that some of the people inside had fired back to protect themselves. While an opening statement is not the time for argument, it is a time when defense lawyers talk about reasonable doubt, and Michael told the jury that the state couldn’t meet its burden on any of the twenty-one attempted murder counts because they couldn’t show who had fired any of the shots or at whom they were fired.
After openings, Richmond called the first of the seven officers. He testified that he and the other officers surrounded the Panther house after chasing a burglary suspect they had seen run inside. It had been early morning and still dark. The police had given warnings over a bullhorn to the occupants to come out. After that, the officer testified, he’d seen and heard shots from the second floor of the house, and returned the fire from behind a tree a hundred feet away.
When I questioned the first police officer, he admitted he could not identify who had fired at him. He also acknowledged he knew the house was where the Panthers lived and the police had contingency plans for a raid. I was trying to establish a motive for the police firing and picked the obvious one—they knew they were Panthers.
Michael and I took turns cross-examining each of the other six police officers. Their testimony was similar to the first, but one of the officers was especially adamant that following a particular flash from the house, he felt the bullets “whizzing past” him as he ducked, and he could tell from which window the shots came. Although the officers got occasional views of the Panther house, they could not identify the persons firing. Still, I feared the jury might sympathize with these young, white, earnest-sounding cops and find our clients guilty, even if the jurors could not identify who fired at which police officers.
On the Saturday after the trial’s second week, Flint, Michael, and I drove the fifty miles to Mount Vernon, Illinois. It was a hot, humid afternoon with only a few clouds to protect us from the sun. We stood in an open area next to a freshly dug grave. It was the final resting place of George Jackson, shot and killed two days earlier on August 21, 1971, by guards at San Quentin State Prison. Jackson had served more than ten years of a one-year-to-life sentence for stealing seventy-one dollars from a gas station. He was the Malcolm X of the prison movement. Like Malcolm, he had educated himself in prison and become a compelling writer and spokesperson for black revolt. He had also been a Panther.
Jackson’s book, Soledad Brother, gives a gripping account of the racism in the criminal justice and prison systems. Like Malcolm’s biography, Jackson’s contains vivid descriptions of the development of consciousness of a black revolutionary; his life was a symbol of resistance. Jackson’s death resulted in work stoppages, memorial services, and teach-ins at prisons throughout the country. The men inside Attica Correctional Facility in New York declared a day of silence during which no one spoke. They also stepped up their demands for humane treatment and set a timetable for the administration to meet with them.
The San Quentin guards who shot Jackson claimed he’d been trying to escape using a pistol that he had concealed in his Afro, supposedly passed to him in the visiting room. Other reports raised the questions of whether he was trying to escape at all and whether the pistol was planted. Jackson had become a particular target of the guards because they suspected that he and two other prisoners, known collectively as the Soledad Brothers, were involved in the killing of a guard in retaliation for another guard’s killing of three prisoners at Soledad Prison. George’s brother, Jonathan Jackson, had entered the Marin County courthouse a year earlier demanding freedom for the Soledad Brothers. He was shot and killed leaving the courthouse, as were the judge he’d taken hostage and two other prisoners who had been on trial and left the building with Jonathan.
George Jackson’s burial took place in a cemetery in an open field, surrounded in the distance by pine trees. From there FBI agents dressed in suits were peering at us through binoculars. George and Jonathan had grown up in Mount Vernon. George’s freshly dug grave sat next to Jonathan’s, and their headstones were only a couple feet apart. We were sweating in our suits. Of the fifty people there, Flint, Michael, and I were the only whites. Georgia Jackson, a stately woman, asked the three of us as we stood next to her sons’ graves who we were.
“We’re Chicago lawyers, defending the Panthers on trial from Carbondale,” I answered.
She told us that what we were doing was important. “You would have liked my son. He was so strong. He taught himself to be a writer. He could have been greater,” she said. “It was such a waste, him spending all those years in prison for nothing. He wasn’t the way they portrayed him. He was smart and read a lot. He was a natural leader and could have helped a lot of people. He had courage. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do, if he thought it was right.” She reminded me of Iberia talking about Fred.
Georgia Jackson urged the three of us to continue fighting to keep black people, particularly Panthers, out of jail. I went back to the trial feeling blessed and inspired, and even more keyed up to free the Carbondale Three.
In court the following Monday, I called the neighbor we had met on our first day in Carbondale. He had a practical, down-home air about him that made his testimony about waking, hearing gunshots, and reaching for his gun, that much more credible. On cross-examination Richmond asked him if he would have shot if he knew it was the police. “Yeah, if they were firing at me,” he replied. We hoped with similar testimony from other neighbors, we would convince the jury that the Panthers’ defending themselves was reasonable and justifiable.
In the closing argument I attempted to go into the history of white violence against black groups, including the December 4 raid by the Chicago police. Richmond objected but I kept talking, finishing my sentence. I tried to put the jurors in the shoes of the neighbors, and by implication, the Panthers. “What would you do if you woke up and heard shots, looked outside, and saw people shooting at you?” I asked. The issue of whether the police announced their office and ordered people to surrender was very much in dispute. I reiterated the defense’s position that this had never happened. The jury went out to deliberate early in the afternoon.
Four hours later we received a call from Judge Prosser’s clerk. The jury had reached their verdict. We hoped the short deliberation could be taken as a sign that we had won without much dissent. On the other hand, it could mean the jury felt the state’s case was clear-cut and that the Panthers were guilty.
I called the defense committee and our friends so that they could come to court for the verdict. Opposite us as we sat down was Dick Richmond, looking weary after the three-week ordeal. The jury came out, not smiling exactly, but not looking at the ground as juries with guilty verdicts frequently do. They looked at the defendants.
The foreman of the jury stood up and announced, “We have reached a verdict.”
The clerk took the jury form and went to the witness stand to read it. “As to count one, the charge of attempted murder against Leonard Thomas, we the jury find him not guilty.” One down and forty-one to go. The clerk continued reading, describing each count. They were each followed by “not guilty.”
When the clerk read the last “not guilty” verdict and started to put the paper down, a spontaneous shout went up from the defendants and spectators. The hugging and crying of relief began. I couldn’t hold back my own tears of joy. Hugging my clients, realizing we had kept them out of prison and that they were going home was spectacular. Flint took off his wig and threw it in the air.
I went over to thank the jury and learned they not only were on our side but wanted to come to the victory party we had announced for that night. They told us one of the four hours they spent deliberating was trying to decide whether Flint’s red curly hair was a wig. They had guessed right.
Later that night we went down to Little Grassy, a lake just outside Carbondale. We shed our clothes and sang and shouted in the warm water well into the night.
The next day we drove back to Chicago. “Panthers Acquitted in Carbondale” was the banner headline, even in the Chicago newspapers.