The Last Panther Trial

...Is it a plot or is it mere coincidence that the progressive nationalists who brought rays of hope to Latin America in the early 1970s are now in the sights of sinister gunmen...

...One juror stood up and turned over a clipping from the Chicago Daily News...

...According to lawyers for both sides, any of these points were sound grounds for declaring a mistrial, and the judge's refusal to grant it has diminished their respect—as has Judge Perry's proclivity for occasional story-swapping from the bench...

...When the judge reads aloud from evidence, he frequently stops or misspeaks himself...

...In Chicago, the city government had declared war on street gangs, and they specifically included the Panthers, despite their breakfast programs and medical clinics and political tracts...

...If a second informant does not exist, the warrant was illegally obtained, and the raid was, therefore, illegal...

...It is possible, too, that the informant survived the raid and is one of the plaintiffs pressing suit—and violating the confidential relationship between the plaintiffs and their lawyers...

...The Government then requested a poll of the jury to determine whether its members had, in violation of their oaths, seen any of the publicity on the controversy...

...He told the press, "I may be a big dude, but I can't eat no $71 worth of ice cream...

...With several months of trial to go, the lawyers are angry and impatient, sensing that this contest is not for keeps...

...But this is what some of the documents have revealed: 5FBI agents sent an unsigned letter to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang, advising: "The brothers than run the Panthers blame you for their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you...

...As he rules, the lawyers sometimes mount a burlesque display of disbelief, as if one of their number had been called out on a sneaky curve that missed the corner...

...At the time of his killing, he was twenty-one years old...

...The plaintiffs cannot possibly afford this, and so they must prepare motions and appeals without transcripts...

...a jury need not find evidence of criminal guilt...

...The chief counsels, James Montgomery and Herbert Reid, who are black, are assisted by members of the People's Law Office, mostly whi;e, a legal collective that is working on the Panther suit without charge...

...Who is really responsible...

...The judge refused...

...When the trial opened last January, the tedium of jury selection was relieved by a few touches of low comedy...

...Privately both sides say they are convinced that an appellate court will direct the case to be tried again...

...It was then the defendants' turn to request a mistrial, and the judge again refused, commenting, "I have confidence that this jury is not going to be influenced by a few headlines...

...RICHARD GOTT in the Manchester Guardian Weekly...

...Sociologists on the plaintiffs' team had surScott Simon is a writer and broadcaster in Chicago...

...For years these have been used in small, unreported countries like Guatemala...

...The plaintiffs' interest was aroused...

...He then held that "irrelevant" information from the files could be expunged—by the FBI and the Department of Justice, both parties to the suit...

...Judge Perry: Could she judge without prejudice the word of a Black Panther...

...a new FBI report mentions traces of Seconal in his blood...

...Martin Luther King Jr., whom J. Edgar Hoover had called "the biggest liar in America," had been assassinated in 1968...

...Judge, to tell you the truth, with all I've been reading recently about them, I think 1 would find it difficult...

...No trial, no jury, no procedure of law or government can restore that possibility...

...Both sides have asked him to declare a mistrial, but the judge has refused...

...According to the plaintiffs, all this points to a conspiracy to intimidate the Panthers and stifle their movement...

...Employes of the city were among the defense...

...In competition with the Congressional intelligence investigations and this year's political campaigns, revelations from the Panther trial have frequently gone unreported...

...The hatches have been battened down all over Latin America, and stability has been bought—at a price...

...Hoover, according to FBI memoranda, had designated the 2,000-member Black Panther Party (of whom at least 200 were supplying information to the FBI) as "the single most dangerous threat to the internal security of the United States," and had instructed his agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist groups...

...In this case, his seventy-nine years may be a handicap...

...The man who should know is Henry Kissinger, who...

...It was his information on illegal weapons (three shotguns) in the Panther apartment that served as the basis for the police search warrant...

...They make the conspiracy connections clear, from the Federal Bureau in Washington down to the city police...

...Diluted by the defense, then further distilled by the judge, these questions turned out to be obvious: "Are you prejudiced against black people...

...The trial has already lasted longer than prospective jurors were led to believe, and even the four-month duration first proposed to them practically excluded young mothers, heads of households, or anyone else who would find it difficult to leave jobs or family for such a length of time...

...Yes, sir...

...he could have been apprehended at any time...

...set out some years ago to "stabilize" the continent...

...The presiding judge, Joseph Sam Perry, has admitted to at least two errors of judgment that have prolonged the trial...

...The plaintiffs' side is to the right...

...A stout Chicago Irishman with a Harvard Law School education, Hanrahan was widely regarded as a protege of the Mayor and his possible successor...

...It is hardly surprising that they should now be widely employed elsewhere...

...Innumerable politicians, academics, journalists, trade union leaders, teachers—the accumulated intellectual wealth of the continent—have been cast into exile by the prevailing climate of uncontrolled violence...

...The defense team to the left is headed by James Coughlan and Camillo Volini, who are being paid by the county and city governments (Coughlan received almost $94,000 last year, qualifying him as the county's highest paid public official...

...veyed the Northern District of Illinois and composed questions designed to search out unspoken prejudice in potential jurors...

...It was exactly this, the Panthers and their sympathizers contend, that the police sought to accomplish in the killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark...

...At this writing, only eight of a projected 120 witnesses have been called...

...The defense can afford the costs of this long trial and the almost certain appeal and re-trial, but they are a real worry to the plaintiffs...

...Near the end of the first week a young black woman was questioned...

...Now the plaintiffs were alarmed and the defense interested...

...that the abuses cannot be attributed to the specific defendants in the suit, and that the Bureau and the police were sometimes compelled to resort to ugly tactics in their efforts to thwart a group that declared itself to be beyond the law...

...It did not...

...It's absolutely mind-boggling...

...Court transcripts, for example, run $2.80 a page, or about $20,000 monthly...

...On the jury of six that has been empaneled in a case in which race is a crucial issue, only one is black, and a lawyer says, '' I hope she doesn't catch any of the flu we're reading about...

...At police academies in Washington and Texas they are taught the techniques of "counter-terror...

...The suit was filed in 1970 by the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who died in a December 1969 police raid on a Black Panther apartment, and by survivors of that raid...

...The Northern District of Illinois, which contains parts of Chicago and several suburbs, has a population that is 31 per cent black...

...At King's funeral, Floyd McKissick of the moderate Congress on Racial Equality had declared that "nonviolence as a tactic is dead...

...Department of Justice...

...Journalists covering the trial have been hard-pressed to describe the courtroom scene as something other than "a study in contrasts...

...The standard of proof is not, as in a criminal case, "beyond a reasonable doubt," but "the preponderance of the evidence"—and the evidence, in this case, is formidable...

...But we respected her economics...

...He was indicted on charges of obstructing justice, which were dismissed when the prosecution withheld evidence from his lawyers...

...In Latin America the violence seems, on the face of it, to be more indiscriminate...

...A Chicago police officer...

...If the informant does exist, he or she may have drugged Fred Hampton the night of the raid...

...During recesses, he discourages interviews...

...Operation Phoenix was a CIA-funded assassination program organized during the Vietnam war, designed to eliminate the Vietcong leaders...

...Some, in the climate of the times, have not been terribly surprising...

...The prosecution was nearly salivating...

...Then it was revealed that she was employed at a social agency of the city of Chicago, where payroll rosters might be read with more concentration than The Times...

...The day-to-day scene in the courtroom does not argue for the ability of courts to deal with emotion-charged issues...

...Though on senior (semi-retired) status, Judge Perry still hears a full case load, and lawyers on both sides doubt whether he has time to read thoroughly all of the voluminous material in the Panther case...

...Perhaps the best substitute for the cliche is one semi-underground publication's reference to the court as "divided as if at a wadding...

...It is felt that this information is of considerable value in consideration of a special payment for informant requested in re Chicago letter...

...I have just never," the judge remarked one day from the bench, "tried a case of this complexity before...

...A pause...

...The platoons of opposing lawyers converge and skirmish around the bench at each point of disagreement while the judge's eyes and ears fumble for a single voice...

...Attorney for the Northern District with a record that, for a member of Mayor Richard Daley's Democratic machine, was unexpectedly tough on government corruption...

...The defense, which will not present its case for several months, is likely to respond that although there were obvious abuses of authority, these did not necessarily constitute a conspiracy...

...An FBI agent...

...A woman from Southwest Chicago, perhaps fifty years old and unmistakably Irish, was asked, "Have you ever been a member of the Black Panther Party...

...Johnson was asked whether it concerned him that the letter, which he had approved, carried false charges...

...He wears a hearing aid, and lawyers before the bench must sometimes raise their voices to be understood...

...Despite such imperfect knowledge of street vernacular, Johnson is now chief of the Chicago Police Board...

...Every day brings news of political murder, assassination, torture, and detention—particularly from Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay...

...1An FBI call to the police in 1969 resulted in Hampton's arrest on his arrival at a television studio where he was to appear on a program...

...The presiding judge, Joseph Sam Perry, is Southern-born, bald-headed, and frail...

...This is a civil case...

...The principal defendant, Edward V. Hanrahan, who as State's Attorney of Cook County ordered the Panther raid, sits silently each day near the farthest wall of the courtroom...

...During the years the program was in operation, many thousands of middle-level and upper-level Vietcong were murdered by the police of the Saigon regime— with training and technical assistance from the Americans...

...She might have made a good juror," he said, "but we couldn't take a chance...

...Such a person might be persuasive in a jury room if she could be convinced that her fellow employes ought to be acquitted...

...Crudely drawn cartoons were sent to the Panthers, supposedly from Ron Karenga's militant United Slaves (US) organization in Los Angeles...

...No, sir," he said after a moment...

...The police raid in which Fred Hampton died reverberates in a Chicago courtroom The Last Panther Trial SCOTT SIMON Chicago The latest and perhaps last of the Black Panther cases is now in its ninth month of courtroom trial...

...The arrest was timed, as Marlin Johnson conceded, "to embarrass the Panthers...

...Both sides seem to accept Judge Perry's decisions only because he has the power to cite them for contempt...

...The warrant was outstanding in Maywood, Illinois, the suburb where he was born, on months-old charges of disturbing the peace...

...Had he made a mistake...

...Almost everywhere, U.S.-supported military regimes are in full control, backed not by the tacit support of the population (as ingenious generals claim), but by their ability to handle guns and to sow a sophisticated system of terror...

...A quantity of weapons and ammunition were recovered...

...Let me put it this way: We sensed her good intentions...

...In questioning a prospective juror, he used the word "Negro," then corrected himself: "or blacks, as I suppose they now want to be called...

...tA September 1969 memo demonstrates that the FBI was not simply trying to disrupt black organizations, but to incite killing: "In view of the recent killing of BPP member SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US...

...It becomes more difficult each day to reconstruct the image that the Black Panther Party must have presented to local and Federal authorities in the late 1960s...

...In country after country, independent radical \»ices urging change have been silenced...

...yet another, sent to the Panthers, advised that a leader of the Vice Lords gang was a police informant: "Watch that mother, and his skin is the only black thing about him...

...He seems to have a hard time getting the name of the Black Panther Party straight...

...When Daley refused to re-slate Hanrahan for a new term as State's Attorney, he ran well enough against the Mayor's candidate to win a Democratic primary, but lost the general election...

...f Another anonymous letter sent to a Chicago gang leader alleged that two Panther leaders, both male, were lovers...

...Fred Hampton's surviving brother, Bill, takes notes, gossips with friends and supporters, shakes the hand of each reporter who attends the trial, and offers himself for interviews...

...They depicted a muscular Karenga wrist-whipping a whimpering Panther...

...From a memo of December 8, 1969: "The raid was based on the information furnished by the informant...

...Peter Schmiedel, who has been working on this case since he graduated from law school in 1971, says, "This might be the most protracted civil case in history...

...This intelligence did not come from any informant, but was wholly invented by the Bureau...

...Phoenix' Reborn...

...But the Black Panther raid and its consequences upset Hanrahan's political career...

...The assassinations of leading Latin American nationalist officers and politicians in the last three years have become so numerous that there is a growing feeling among observers of the continent's politics that something akin to "Operation Phoenix" is now under way...

...During the testimony of an FBI agent, it was inadvertently discovered that the Bureau had provided less than 10 per cent of the documents it had been directed to produce...

...He insisted, at first, that FBI documents under subpoena could not be admitted as evidence unless they specifically mentioned the names of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark—a ruling he reversed two days before the trial opened...

...At the recess I questioned a sociologist involved by the Panthers in the jury selection...

...I think you ought to know what their [sic] up to, I know what to do if I was you...

...And: "Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego...

...The defense was alarmed...

...The subject of the letter, in fact, was not a police informant...

...often it comes out as the "Black Party Panther...

...The plaintiffs' lawyers asked for a mistrial and contempt charges against the Government for defying court orders...

...He was often in court, but he was convicted only once—of stealing $71 worth of ice cream from a Good Humor truck...

...She listed herself as a daily reader of all three Chicago papers and a weekly reader of The New York Times...

...But surprisingly, the Panther lawyers believe that the chances of a judgment against the government defendants are fairly strong...

...At a time when the American system is congratulating itself on having worked so well in uncovering the horrors of Watergate (ably assisted by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), there is evidence that it may once again be stumbling in Chicago...

...Defeated in Asia, outmaneuvered in Africa, it became necessary for the United States to pay more attention to its own backyard...

...Of the 400 prospective jurors from which the panel was chosen, only twenty-four, or 6 per cent, were black...

...And finally: "Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the counterintelligence program...

...The charges were dismissed...

...During the resistance by the BPP members at the time of the raid, the chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the BPP, FRED HAMPTON, was killed and a BPP leader from Peoria, Illinois, was also killed...

...For years now the United States has been training Latin American policemen in terrorist tactics...

...Lawyers who have tried cases in his court regard him as a kindly man whose civility and graciousness have served him well as a trial judge, though he is not considered a legal scholar...

...The defense raised a last objection, but the judge clearly could not now permit her to serve, and she was dismissed for cause...

...I don't understand it that way at all," Johnson insisted to an incredulous courtroom, adding that he thought hit "is something nonviolent in nature...

...We may wonder about this, but we will never know...

...Ask him if he works for the pigs and watch him squirm...

...That warrant, however, refers to "two reliable informants," and the Chicago police refuse to disclose the name of the second...

...He also admonished his agents in 1969 to "prevent the rise of another Black Messiah...

...They contend that the persons and agencies named as defendants conspired to deprive the Panthers of their civil rights...

...During the year of his death, Chicago newspapers carried more than 200 articles on Fred Hampton, chairman of the Black Panther Party of Illinois...

...A lawyer for the plaintiffs says, "There is no conceivable end in sight...

...The universities have virtually become free-fire zones...

...Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of unrest is directly attributable to this program...

...He has since run unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress and for mayor (against Daley...

...The plaintiffs, of course, are black...

...he has twice told the one about his good friend, the color-blind lawyer who could never tell who was white and who was black, and wouldn't it be wonderful if the whole world could be that way...

...Panther lawyers then rose to say she was unfit as a juror because she had admitted to a prejudice...

...tWhen the Chicago raid of December 4, 1969, took place, police had a floor plan of the Panthers' apartment and a list of tenants supplied by William O'Neal, director of security for the Panthers and an informant to the FBI...

...In 1973, the judge dismissed complaints against Hanrahan and his assistants on grounds that they were protected by "prosecutorial immunity"—a ruling that was overturned on appeal...

...His book, ' 'Day of the Sun,'' was published last year by History House...

...It's in the documents," says Peter Sch-miedel, a young lawyer from New Jersey...

...Yes, sir...

...50'Neal, who has been provided with a new identity, is to testify at the trial...

...The case is a civil suit that seeks $47.7 million in damages from thirty-one defendants who represent the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State's Attorney of Cook County, the Chicago Police Department, and the U.S...

...Hampton was making no effort to conceal his movements...

...They already got," says Fred Hampton's brother, Bill, "what they wanted...

...A young black woman who read The New York Times carefully enough to be skeptical of the FBI was almost a model juror from the plaintiffs' point of view...

...The plaintiffs suggested to defendant Marlin Johnson, chief of the Bureau's Chicago office in 1969, that "hit" was intended to mean "kill...

...In 1969 he had completed a term as U.S...

...It has become part of the lore of this trial that the Black Panther Party, had it not been pursued and effectively destroyed, might have brought about a coalition among black groups in America, and that Fred Hampton, had he lived, might have had the wit and warmth and cunning to become one of its leaders...