In New York State there are at least eight former Black Panthers still in jail,
some of them since the early 1970s, for the same sort of politically-motivated acts
for which Power was hunted. They are among twenty-five to thirty
Panthers imprisoned nationwide. Some were members of the original "Panther 21,"
targets of police entrapment. Some were with the Black Liberation Army,
formed after the Panthers were decimated by the FBI's covert anti-Black
leadership program (COINTELPRO). Some, like California's Elmer "Geronimo"
Pratt or New York's Dhoruba Bin Wahad (whose conviction was overturned
in 1991 after nineteen years in prison), were framed; others were convicted
on tainted evidence; all were sentenced far too harshly. Robert "Seth"
Hayes has been in jail the longest, since 1971. Teddy "Jah" Heath has been in
jail since 1973 for a kidnapping in which no one was injured. Herman Bell,
Albert "Nuh" Washington and Anthony Bottoms (the "New York Three")
are still in prison even though a federal judge recently ruled that testimony
convicting them of killing a policeman was perjured. Abdul Majid and Bashir
Hameed, convicted of killing a policeman in 1981 after two mistrials, are now
appealling their third trial in which the prosecution used
eighty percent of its challenges to exclude Black jurors.
Most of these men, who have already been in prison for decades, will
not be eligible for parole until long after
Katherine Ann Power has returned to freedom.

It is no secret that violence and criminality by police was a desperate issue in the Black community, then as now. The Mollen Commission itself admits it has revealed nothing new. Rodney King was not the first African-American man beaten unmercifully by police; he was only the first on prime-time TV. And J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program was only the most notorious of many illegal government operations aimed at preventing the rise of a "Black Messiah." Whatever our position today on these issues, it dishonors no one to recognize that the Panthers were not criminals out for personal gain. The injustices they struggled against and the contribution they made are recognized by the entire Black community. It is time for the US government to show the same capacity for mercy that even the bitterest of enemies can, on occasion, exhibit. It is ironic that at the very time when Israel was releasing its longest held political prisoner, Salim Zerai, after twenty-three years, former Black Panther Sundiata Acoli, captured with Assata Shakur in 1973, was turned down for ...

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