A shock to the system

Behind the Sun:
A shock to the system

http://www.pacificsun.com/news/show_story.php?id=2060&e=y

'We have a very grave situation here… lives are at stake'

by Jason Walsh
August 10, 2010

"Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard­some of us
is prisoners, the rest of us is guards"­Bob Dylan, "George Jackson"

[From the Sun vaults, Aug. 12 ­ 18, 1970

On Aug. 7, 1970, convict James McClain stood trial at the Marin
County Courthouse for knifing a San Quentin screw. When suddenly a
17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson rose from his seat, drew a handgun
and shouted, "All right, gentlemen­just hold it right there."

The high school student from Pasadena tore open a bag and tossed
weapons to McClain, and two witnesses at the trial--and a pair cons
known as Magee and Christmas.

Everyone in the courthouse was ordered face-to-the-floor; the
bailiffs told to unlock all handcuffs; and Marin Superior Court Judge
Harold Haley ordered to "get the Sheriff on the phone."

The gun-wielding youth who suddenly, violently and literally held
court that day was the kid brother of incarcerated Marxist
revolutionary George Jackson, the 28-year-old con-celebre whose
published collection of 1960s prison letters, Soledad Brother, had
made him the most politically powerful yardbird west of Sing Sing.
George was due to stand trial for his role in the revenge killing of
a prison guard, and Jonathan's unhinged scheme was a desperate play
for a hostage exchange­judge and jurors' lives for big brother's freedom.

"Get Sheriff Mountanos on the phone right now," Haley commanded into
a phone, while the escapees strapped the barrel of a sawed-off
shotgun directly into the judge's throat. "We have a very grave
situation here," the judge pleaded. "Lives are at stake."

Next, Jackson and his cohorts ushered Haley, assistant Marin DA Gary
Thomas, and three petrified female jurors out of the courthouse,
through the Civic Center halls, and out into a getaway van in which
they'd planned to tear down the Avenue of the Flags toward
freedom­and hostage negotiations. But the desperate Marin gendarme
would lay a different course.

A shot rang out­and then another. A flurry of bullets exchanged
sides. Minutes later, with smoke cleared and revolvers emptied,
Jackson, McClain, Christmas and the judge lay dead outside the Frank
Lloyd Wright building­Haley, killed by a slug from the shotgun
fastened to his neck. Two jurors were wounded. A police bullet had
found its way into Gary Thomas's spine; the remainder of his highly
successful legal career would be conducted from the confines of a wheel chair.

The stunning tragedy at the Marin County Courthouse made national
headlines. The New York Daily News put the story on its front page,
with the headline: "Verdict: Death."

In an editorial that week, Pacific Sun managing editor Don Stanley
tried to make sense of what happened that day. An escape attempt from
within the system is at least somewhat understandable, Stanley
reasoned. But this was different. This was an attack upon the courts
from the outside­from society itself.

"Until recently," wrote Stanley, "the role of the court… has been
secure. The court is, in a real sense, a sanctuary for a democratic
society whose legislatures have become charades, whose churches bingo
parlors, whose campuses battlegrounds. But last Friday that sanctuary
was invaded… and social investigators must follow a more depressing
logic: What could drive a 17 year old youngster to play the central
role in a tragedy that brought him to defy such a socially sanctified
force as a hall of justice?"

In the year that saw the Weathermen plotting to bomb military dance
halls in New Jersey, the founding of Black September and its march
toward murder at the Munich Olympics, and the Red Army Faction
launching deadly operations in West Berlin, the social revolutions of
the world had violently stepped up to Marin County's doorstep. The
Pacific Sun ended its coverage with many questions and few
conclusions, and with the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from 1920:
"The attacks upon the Court are merely an expression of the unrest
that seems to wonder vaguely whether law and order pay," wrote Holmes.
"When the ignorant are taught to doubt [that law and order pay" he
concluded, "they do not know what they safely may believe."

George Jackson was gunned down a year later, just three days before
his trial, in a bungled escape attempt at San Quentin that left him
and five others dead.

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