http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1742/1/
Written by Hans Bennett
Monday, 02 November 2009
Reviewed: The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the
Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffrey Haas, Published
by Lawrence Hill Books, 424 Pages.
[ See: www.hamptonbook.com ]
On the morning of December 4, 1969, lawyer Jeffrey Haas received a
call from his partner at the People's Law Office, informing him that
early that morning Chicago police had raided the apartment of
Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton at 2337 West
Monroe Street in Chicago. Tragically, Hampton and fellow Panther Mark
Clark had both been shot dead, and four other Panthers in the
apartment had critical gunshot wounds. Police were uninjured and had
fired their guns 90-99 times. In sharp contrast, the Panthers had
shot once, from the shotgun held by Mark Clark, which had most likely
been fired after Clark had been fatally shot in the heart and was
falling to the ground.
Haas went straight to the police station to speak with Hampton's
fiancée, Deborah Johnson, who was then eight months pregnant with
Hampton's son. She had been sleeping in bed next to Hampton when the
police attacked and began shooting into the apartment and towards the
bedroom where they were sleeping. Miraculously, Johnson had not been
shot, but her account given to Haas was chilling. Throughout the
assault Hampton had remained unconscious (strong evidence emerged
later that a paid FBI informant had given Hampton a sedative that
prevented him from waking up) and after police forced Johnson out of
the bedroom, two officers entered the room where Hampton still lay
unconscious. Johnson heard one officer ask, "Is he still alive?"
After two gunshots were fired inside the room, the other officer
said, "He's good and dead now."
Jeffrey Haas' account of this conversation with Johnson jumps right
out from the inside cover of his new book entitled The Assassination
of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black
Panther, just released. In this excellent new book, Haas gives his
personal account of defending the Panther survivors of the December 4
police assault against the criminal charges that were later dropped,
and of filing a civil rights lawsuit, Hampton v. Hanrahan, on behalf
of the survivors and the families of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. The
civil rights lawsuit lasted for almost 13 years, but ended with a
$1.85 million settlement paid equally by the city, county, and
federal governments. This battle in the courtroom is a long and
complex story, but the 375-page book packs a punch and clearly
presents the legal complexities without watering down Haas' outrage
about Hampton's assassination and the cover up that followed.
The Assassination of Fred Hampton
An autopsy conducted on Hampton by a doctor hired by Haas and the
People's Law Office (PLO) confirmed Deborah Johnson's account about
Hampton being shot twice after she was forced out of the bedroom.
Haas reports that autopsy "found that both head wounds came from the
top right side of the head in a downward direction...They were
consistent with two shots to the head at point blank range…The
downward angles of the bullets were inconsistent with the horizontal
shots that came through the wall from the front." Other than these
fatal bullet holes, the only physical marks on Fred were a bullet
found embedded in the exterior of his shoulder and a graze wound in
his leg. In two separate tests that were part of this same autopsy a
high dosage of the barbiturate Seconal was found--enough to make
Hampton unconscious or very drowsy.
At 4am on December 4, Cook County prosecutor Edward Hanrahan and 14
Chicago police officers assigned to Hanrahan had been armed with
shotguns, handguns, and a .45 caliber machine gun. The raiders were
officially carrying out a search warrant, looking for weapons, but
suspiciously did not arrive at 8pm the night before when they knew
the apartment was empty. Following the attack, Hanrahan and police
publicly claimed to have been under heavy fire from the Panthers, and
that Panthers had first fired on them through the front door. The
actual evidence at the crime scene proved otherwise, and Chicago
Panthers and supporters immediately mobilized to expose the police lies.
Hampton's apartment had been left unguarded, so the Panthers went
inside to examine the scene alongside videographers who later
released their footage in the 1971 documentary film entitled The
Murder of Fred Hampton. The apartment was opened to the public, and
the media was urged to come and see for themselves that there was
only one bullet in the wall (from Mark Clark's shotgun) that could
have been fired from the direction the Panthers were facing towards
the front door. In contrast, there were 90-99 bullets in the walls
that had been shot inward from the direction of the front door where
police entered.
A county grand jury indicted each of the seven Panther survivors for
attempted murder, armed violence, and other weapons charges, but all
these charges would later be dropped. Hanrahan and police were first
exonerated from any misconduct by the police Internal Investigations
Division. Next, a coroner's inquest found Hampton and Clark's deaths
were "justifiable homicide." A federal grand jury, led by deputy
attorney general Jerris Leonard investigated whether Hanrahan and
police had violated the civil rights of the Panthers inside 2337 West
Monroe Street. However, in May 1970, the federal grand jury issued a
132-page report, but no indictments. Furthermore, Haas writes that
the report "never sought to determine who fired the fatal shots,
where they were from, or whether they were fired deliberately to
murder Fred." Following public pressure, in June 1970 a special
prosecutor, Barnabas Sears, was appointed by Cook County's Chief
Criminal Court Judge Joseph Power. In July 1972, this criminal trial
for conspiracy to obstruct justice began before Judge Philip Romiti.
In November that year, all defendants were found not guilty.
After the federal grand jury's ruling in May 1970 that exonerated
Hanrahan and others, they decided to file the civil rights lawsuit.
At the meeting where the lawyers, December 4 survivors, and family
members of Hampton and Clark made their decision, Clark's mother
Fannie expressed how they all were feeling, saying "We can't just do
nothing. Mark and Fred should still be alive. I want to bring their
killers to trial." Reflecting back, Haas explains why the lawsuit was
an important legal strategy as well. "In civil cases, extensive
discovery is allowed. We could get to cross-examine all the
defendants under oath at depositions, with court reporters recording
what they said. The contradictions between Hanrahan's and the
raiders' account, and the physical evidence made the prospect of
confronting the defendants a trial lawyer's dream…we needed to write
the complaint to combine the claims of the survivors and the deceased
into one lawsuit against all the perpetrators…The legal construct we
had found was to charge all the actors in a conspiracy to act
together. That way we combined Hanrahan, [Hanrahan's assistant,
Richard] Jalovec, the fourteen raiders, the crime lab people, and
those who falsified the investigation…In May of 1970 we filed our
complaint. We had no idea we were embarking on a 13-year battle," writes Haas.
The joint-civil suit was assigned to a right-wing judge named Joseph
Sam Parry, who threw out their entire complaint on February 3, 1972.
They appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court and on August 4, 1973, the
Court overturned Parry, and sent it back for a new trial.
Unfortunately, they were unable to get a new judge, and throughout
the subsequent 18-month trial, Parry was extremely biased and blocked
all kinds of testimony and evidence from being entered into the
record. The jury was deadlocked, but instead of declaring a mistrial,
Parry himself ruled to dismiss the case entirely. Haas and PLO's
subsequent appeal of Parry's ruling to the Seventh Circuit was
successful, and the case was sent back down to the district court for
a new trial. Fortunately, this time they got a new judge, who urged
the defendants to make a settlement before starting a new trial.
Finally, on February 28, 1983, the settlement was made, and Hampton
et al. received $1.85 million from the city, county, and federal governments.
COINTELPRO and Fred Hampton
The FBI's top-secret and illegal counterintelligence program dubbed
"COINTELPRO" became public after a 1971 break-in to the FBI office in
Media, Pennsylvania by unknown antiwar activists. These activists
discovered these explosive documents that revealed an FBI war on the
civil rights and later Black liberation movements, and quickly made
them public. Among these liberated files was a March 3, 1968
COINTELPRO memo discussing the urgent need to prevent "the beginning
of a true black revolution." Among several of the program's goals was
to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify,
the militant black nationalist movement". This "Black
Nationalist-Hate Groups" memo refers to Martin Luther King (long a
target of the FBI) as a potential "messiah" of the supposedly hateful
and "violent" Black liberation movement.
This same document stated: "Through counterintelligence it should be
possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them."
Another stated goal was "to prevent the long-range growth of militant
black nationalist organizations, especially among youth. Specific
tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be
developed." One specific tactical approach was expressed in an April
3, 1968 communique arguing that "The Negro youth and moderates must
be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching,
they will be dead revolutionaries."
In terms of scale, the FBI's war of repression against the Black
liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was greatest against the
Panthers. In addressing why the Panthers were targeted so intensely
by COINTELPRO, Noam Chomsky wrote in 1973: "A top secret Special
Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the
motivations for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy
the Black Panther Party. The report describes the party as 'the most
active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.' Its
'hard core members' were estimated at 800, but 'a recent poll
indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a
great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21
years of age.' On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the
party, the repressive apparatus of the state proceeded against it to
ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social
or political force."
When these liberated COINTELPRO files became public, Haas, PLO, and
his Panther clients immediately suspected that the Dec. 4 police raid
had been part of this program, and that the FBI had viewed Hampton as
a potential "messiah," who needed to be "neutralized." As part of
their civil rights lawsuit, they filed numerous motions requesting
all FBI files relating to the Illinois Panthers and COINTELPRO. After
repeated attempts by the defendants and Judge Parry to cover up the
FBI role, eventually a few explosive documents were made available.
One document showed a drawing made by the FBI's paid informant,
William O'Neal, which provided the floor plan of Hampton's apartment.
The FBI had supplied this diagram to prosecutor Edward Hanrahan
before he led the raid several days later. Following the raid, the
FBI paid O'Neal a special bonus to thank him for providing the diagram.
Another document surfaced showing that the FBI had made a deal with
deputy attorney general Jerris Leonard, who led the 1970 federal
grand jury investigation. In an effort to conceal the FBI's role and
the still-secret COINTELPRO, they decided that the criminal charges
would be dropped against the seven Panther survivors, and in exchange
the federal grand jury would rule in favor of Hanrahan and the police raiders.
A third explosive document showed a fake letter sent to Jeff Fort,
the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, which accused the Panthers of
planning a "hit" on Fort. The FBI hoped that the fake letter would
incite Fort and the Rangers to "take retaliatory action" against
Hampton and the Panthers.
As this new documentation emerged, the FBI was added to the list of
defendants for the civil rights lawsuit, and making the FBI pay 1/3
of the $1.85 million was a key part of the settlement.
Defending the Carbondale Six and the Attica Brothers
Haas was fresh out of law school when he first met Fred Hampton and
was asked to work as a lawyer for the many Panther defendants that
were victims of repression. Haas and several other young radical
lawyers collectively opened the People's Law Office (PLO) in Chicago
and began defending Panthers, as well as Puerto Rican political
prisoners, antiwar protesters, prisoner activists, and other
revolutionary groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the
Young Lords, and the Young Patriots. Alongside Haas' account of
working specifically on the Hampton case, he also reflects on many of
the other struggles from that era that he became involved with,
illustrating how Hampton's assassination did not happen in a vacuum.
For example, on November 12, 1970, there was a shootout between
police and Panthers in the southern Illinois town of Carbondale. In
the middle of the night, police attacked a house being rented by
Panthers, and as neighbors would testify at trial, police began to
shoot into their house without any warning. In response, the Panthers
inside the house shot back, and in the end, bullets had struck two
Panthers and one police officer, but no one had been killed. One of
the occupants of the Panther house, Milton Boyd, told Haas that "we
were prepared to defend ourselves…We weren't going to be ambushed and
killed like our brothers in Chicago."
The six Panther defendants were each charged with seven counts of
attempted murder and became known as the "Carbondale Six." Haas and
the PLO defended them by arguing first that it was impossible to
identify who in the house was actually shooting, and second that
since the police began shooting at them first, unannounced, in the
middle of the night, the Panthers acted in legitimate self-defense by
shooting back. In a stunning victory, an all-white jury found the
defendants innocent of all charges.
Haas writes that during the Carbondale Six trial, he and two other
PLO lawyers drove to Mount Vernon, Illinios to attend the memorial
service for the legendary Panther and prison author George Jackson,
who two days earlier, had been shot and killed by San Quentin Prison
guards, on August 21, 1971. Haas reflects on how at the service, they
spoke with Jackson's mother. Georgia, who "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."
Haas writes that "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." These pleas were ignored, and on
September 9, 1971, twelve hundred prisoners seized control over a
quarter of Attica. Haas recounts that "the prisoners took thirty-nine
guards hostage and demanded to meet with Commissioner Russell Oswald
and that Warden Mancusi be fired…I watched the confrontation on
television, moved by the bravery of the mostly Black and Latino
prisoners and by the reasonableness of what they sought…While the
prison administration said it would comply with some of the demands,
they were adamant about no amnesty for the rebellious prisoners. The
prisoners who led the takeover would be criminally prosecuted. A
deadlocked loomed. Tensions grew."
On September 13, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state police
to go in with their guns firing, and ultimately twenty-nine prisoners
and ten hostages were shot dead, with many more wounded. When the
National Lawyers Guild put out a call for lawyers to visit Attica,
Hass and others at PLO responded. The first prisoner they interviewed
was Frank "Big Black" Smith, who recounted the horrors of the police
massacre and torture of prisoners for days following the massacre.
Smith was a key figure in the prisoners' revolt and had been
appointed to head of security for the yard, which included protecting
the hostages. Smith explained that "the hostages got the same food
and water as everyone else, and we didn't let anyone bother them. No
one got near them without my permission. We even shared our blankets
with them." When the state police attacked "the hostages were shot
down like dogs, like the rest of us. The troopers had all the guns.
It was a slaughter and they didn't care who they hit," said Smith.
The horror continued after the state police and prison authorities
regained control. With tears in his eyes, Smith recounted how "the
guards stripped us naked after the shooting. Then they made us crawl
naked in the mud through a gauntlet where they beat us…They took me
out of the line. They made me lie on a table naked on my back and put
a football under my chin. They put their burning cigarettes out on
me. Some dropped them from the catwalk above and were laughing. They
told me if I moved and the football hit the ground I was dead. I
tried not to move. I was sure they were going to kill me. They knew I
was in charge of security and used me as an example to scare everyone
else, because nobody else got this treatment."
The accounts of other prisoners interviewed by Haas, PLO, and other
lawyers reinforced Smith's heart-wrenching story. After returning to
Chicago, Haas worked to publicize these accounts, but soon returned
to working mostly on the Hampton case while his PLO colleagues
continued to work with other lawyers in defending the 60 indicted
prisoners, who became known as the "Attica Brothers."
They Got Away With Murder
Certainly, the $1.85 million lawsuit was only a partial victory. No
amount of money can replace the lives of Hampton and Clark, or heal
the gunshot injuries that several of the Panther survivors still
suffer from today. Furthermore, it is painful to accept that none of
the conspirators were ever convicted of any criminal charges, nor
were they forced to pay for the settlement out of their own pockets.
However, the scale of victory should not be judged by the settlement
money alone. On the last page of the book, Haas describes a 2008
visit with Iberia Hampton shortly after her husband Francis had
passed away. He asked her "after all these years, what do you think
our lawsuit proved?" Without hesitation Iberia replied, "They got
away with murder."
Indeed, they did get away with murder. In this context, the
victorious civil rights lawsuit has been used to further expose and
document this stark injustice. Many COINTELPRO files were made public
because of the lawsuit, and the numerous conspirators were put under
some scrutiny for the public to see. Today, if we learn anything from
this story, it's that we should have no illusions about how far the
government is willing to go in repressing dissent and then covering
it up. Also, the courtroom victory that was fought against all odds
should inspire activists today who are working around issues of state
repression and political prisoners. We can win, and we should never
give up the fight.
For more information, see this 1971 film "The Murder of Fred Hampton."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6418849978684923626
--
Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist and co-founder
of Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has written for numerous
publications, including Alternet, ColorLines, Upside Down World, Z
Magazine, Dissident Voice, and Toward Freedom.
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