From The Partisan Defense Committee- Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145 30 November 2018 Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Freedom Now for Kevin Cooper! California (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison. In 2004, Cooper was less than four hours away from being murdered by the State of California when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a stay of execution issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That stay was granted after questions were raised over the prosecution’s evidence against Cooper in his 1985 trial. As one of the appeals court judges, William Fletcher, later wrote: “Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be—and in my view probably is—innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.” Cooper’s case returned to the public spotlight earlier this year after the New York Times published a May 17 op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof that compellingly detailed the police frame-up. It began almost immediately after the brutally mutilated bodies of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old neighbor were found in the Ryens’ house in Chino Hills, California, on 5 June 1983. Incredibly, the Ryens’ 8-year-old son Joshua, whose throat was slit and skull fractured, survived. At the hospital, Joshua communicated to a social worker that the killers were three or four white men. This matched the coroner’s initial conclusion that there had been several killers who had used a hatchet, an ice pick and knives. But this and other evidence was thrown out by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department as soon as they realized they could pin the murders on Cooper. A 25-year-old black man with a criminal record, he more than fit the police profile of a wanted suspect in racist, capitalist America. Three days before the murders, Cooper had escaped from a nearby minimum-security prison, where he was serving a four-year sentence for burglary. He had then hidden out in a house next door to the Ryens before fleeing to Mexico. Evidence shows that Cooper checked into a Tijuana hotel on June 5. The next day, cops looked through the house where Cooper had hidden and found nothing. But as soon as Cooper became their prime suspect, “evidence” suddenly turned up, including a bloodstained button from a green prison uniform. Cooper’s was brown. A hatchet sheath was all of a sudden found in the house. Cigarette butts that the cops claimed were Cooper’s were likewise suddenly discovered in the ashtray of the Ryens’ station wagon, which had been stolen the night of the murders. Buried was the testimony of local residents who reported seeing three white men driving the station wagon, as well as the accounts of witnesses who had seen three white men in bloody clothing in a nearby bar. Two bloody shirts were later found down the street from the bar. On June 9, a call was made to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department by a woman saying that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had come home on the night of the Ryen murders in an unfamiliar station wagon, wearing bloody coveralls but not the T-shirt he had on earlier in the day. She turned the coveralls over to the police, who threw them away! Cooper, who has maintained his innocence from the beginning, fought to have a DNA test done on a bloody T-shirt that had been found near the Ryens’ house. When the test, which was conducted in 2002, showed his blood on the shirt, Cooper insisted that it had been planted by the police. Further testing after the 2004 stay of execution revealed that the blood on the shirt included a chemical that the police use to preserve blood samples. When a vial of the blood taken from Cooper was tested, it was found to contain the DNA of Cooper and another person. In short, it’s likely that the police planted blood from the vial on the shirt and then topped it off with someone else’s blood to make it look like the vial hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, the court upheld Cooper’s conviction and death sentence. In his op-ed, Kristof noted that the defense attorney’s repeated requests for advanced DNA testing had been refused by California’s Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown, as well as by Kamala Harris, who was the state’s attorney general from 2011-17. Now a U.S. Senator and hopeful contender for the top slot on the Democrats’ presidential ticket in 2020, Harris immediately responded to Kristof’s column, declaring: “As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing.” The cynicism is breathtaking. For his part, Governor Brown, who leaves office in January, has refused to grant Cooper’s request for DNA testing. When Kristof suggested that every day matters “for an innocent man on death row,” Brown simply shrugged that “California has 130,000 prisoners.” He should know. For years, Brown openly defied a Supreme Court ruling that conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons were so atrocious that they violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” In his previous stint as attorney general of California, which has the most death row inmates in the U.S., Brown similarly shrugged off the notion that anyone on death row could be innocent. Kristof presents the case of Kevin Cooper as “the story of a broken justice system.” Far from it. The police frame-up of Cooper is an object lesson in how the racist injustice system of American capitalism actually works. As Cooper himself observed: “I’m frameable, because I’m an uneducated black man in America. Sometimes it’s race, and sometimes it’s class.” The cops, courts, prisons and military are at the core of a state apparatus whose purpose is the defense of the profits, property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s machinery of violence. In the U.S., legal lynching is rooted in the very foundation of American capitalism, which was built on black chattel slavery and continues to be maintained through the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society. Those condemned to death row have always been disproportionately black. The fight for Cooper’s freedom is a cause that is in the interest of the multiracial working class and all opponents of the brutal racism, exploitation and oppression enforced by the capitalist state. Free Kevin Cooper now! Abolish the racist death penalty!

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two Free Ed Poindexter! (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom.

Workers Vanguard No. 1145	30 November 2018

The Frame-Up of the Omaha Two

Free Ed Poindexter!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom. Along with his codefendant Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, then known as David Rice, Poindexter was framed up on bogus charges of killing Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard in an August 1970 bomb explosion. Without a shred of physical evidence and based on the perjured testimony of teenager Duane Peak at their 1971 trial, Poindexter and Mondo, leaders of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a Black Panther Party (BPP) affiliate, were sentenced to life. Mondo died in prison in 2016. The racist capitalist rulers have made it clear that is the only way they will let Poindexter leave his prison hell.

A July 2018 book by Michael Richardson, Framed: J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO & the Omaha Two Story, lays bare the racist conspiracy by the FBI and Omaha police to frame up Poindexter and Mondo as part of the murderous FBI COINTELPRO vendetta against the Panthers. Based on a decade of meticulous research, the book exposes the lies of cops, prosecutors and FBI agents. It details collusion at the highest levels of the FBI with the Omaha police to suppress evidence, as well as prosecutorial intimidation and coaching of Duane Peak to concoct a scenario that tied Poindexter and Mondo to Minard’s killing.

Like the Panthers, the NCCF rejected the turn-the-other-cheek pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr., advocating armed self-defense in the face of racist cop terror. The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist BPP crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But the program of the Panthers was disdainful of the multiracial working class, which has real social power based on its role in production. This isolation from the proletariat left the Panthers especially vulnerable to government repression.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” He said of an expanded COINTELPRO: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” Hoover spelled out what he meant in 1968, when he stated: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

This was no idle threat. Thirty-eight Panthers were killed and hundreds more arrested on bogus charges. Richardson describes the 4 December 1969 FBI-orchestrated raid by Chicago cops on the apartment of 20-year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was assassinated together with Mark Clark as they slept in their beds. Four days later, a SWAT team laid siege to the Panther office in Los Angeles, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition. The primary target was L.A. BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Vietnam War vet whose military knowledge was crucial that day to saving his own life and those of his comrades. Geronimo was subsequently framed up for a 1968 murder and spent 27 years in prison (eight of them in solitary) before his conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1997; he died in 2011. Those the authorities couldn’t kill were railroaded to prison hell. Among them is class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was falsely convicted of the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

The sinister motivation for the frame-up of Poindexter and Mondo was made clear two decades later by Jack Swanson, the Omaha Police Intelligence Division liaison with the FBI. In a 1991 documentary by George Case, Black Panthers, Swanson boasted: “I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from the city of Omaha.” For his role in the frame-up, Swanson was promoted to lieutenant and later became Omaha’s chief of police.

By the time he joined the BPP, Mondo was known as a performance artist and anti-poverty worker. Like many military veterans, Poindexter was radicalized by the Vietnam War and sought in the BPP the vehicle to place his military experience in the service of the black freedom struggle. The two joined with the BPP in response to relentless racist police brutality—which brought Omaha to a boil with the killing of black 14-year-old Vivian Strong, who was shot in the back of the head by a cop in the summer of 1969. Strong’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury. A year earlier, a black high school student had been shot dead by the cops during protests against arch-segregationist George Wallace, who held a rally in the city during his presidential election campaign.

In the early morning hours of 17 August 1970, Omaha police received a 911 call from a man speaking with a deep gravelly voice, reporting that a woman was screaming from a vacant house. When the cops arrived, the house was empty except for a suitcase inside the doorway. That suitcase exploded, killing Minard. Afterward, Omaha police rounded up dozens of black people in a racist dragnet. Richardson points out that within hours, the FBI knew from its informants that Mondo and Poindexter were not involved in Minard’s death—but it is the two of them that the cops and FBI targeted.

Among those picked up was 15-year-old Duane Peak, who confessed to placing the bomb. Peak told the cops at least six versions of what happened. Initially, he stated that he acted alone, and that Poindexter and Mondo were not involved. Threatened with the death penalty and promised a deal, Peak agreed to implicate them.

At a preliminary hearing, he effectively recanted his accusations against Poindexter and Mondo. The prosecution asked for a break. Two hours later, Peak returned to court wearing sunglasses, which when removed revealed swollen eyes. He then repeated his earlier fabrication that Poindexter had built the bomb using dynamite that was stored in Mondo’s basement. The next day, Peak confided in a letter from jail to a family friend, Olivia Norris: “From now on I refuse to call myself a man, or anything close to a man, because I did what I did.” He added, “I not only turned against those two bloods, but I turned against myself and my own people.” That letter, which prosecutors knew about, was suppressed along with other evidence.

Peak testified that he carried the suitcase bomb around North Omaha from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., taking it into three different cars and two residences. Four witnesses, including two cousins of Peak, testified that Peak was never together with Poindexter and Mondo at the times and places that Peak claimed. Peak also testified that it was he who made the 911 call. A recording of the 911 call was never played for the jury. Omaha police had sent a copy of the tape to FBI headquarters for analysis but later asked that no written report be issued, putting a stop to the search for the identity of the caller. An FBI memo pointed to a warning by the Omaha assistant chief of police that use of the tapes “might be prejudicial to the police murder trial.” Hoover himself signed off on this suppression of evidence. Testifying at a 2007 hearing on Poindexter’s petition for a new trial, vocal analyst Tom Owen confirmed that Peak could not have made that phone call.

Peak testified that he never entered into a deal with the prosecution, and the prosecutor denied that any bargain was struck. After testifying against Mondo and Poindexter, Peak pleaded guilty to juvenile delinquency in juvenile court.

The cops’ claim that they had recovered dynamite from the basement of Mondo’s house was transparently false. Of the more than two dozen police photos of the basement, not one shows any dynamite—which only appears in photos of the trunk of a police cruiser. Jack Swanson testified at the 1971 trial that he found the dynamite in a coal bin but changed his story in a 1974 federal appeal hearing, saying he saw it by the furnace. In the 2007 hearing, another cop who at trial had backed up Swanson’s story claimed that he, not Swanson, discovered the dynamite. The court ruled these contradictions “immaterial.” Neither Mondo’s nor Poindexter’s fingerprints were found on the dynamite. In the George Case documentary, Marvin McClarty, a former Omaha policeman present at the search, said he knew that the cops “were out to get those two,” adding: “To this day I still believe that it [the dynamite] was planted in that house.”

The cops also claimed that residue recovered from Mondo’s pants and Poindexter’s pockets tested positive for dynamite. A photo of Mondo taken moments before he surrendered his pants showed him with his hands deeply thrust in his pockets, yet swabs from their hands tested negative. In 1999, a retired top FBI explosives expert, Fred Whitehurst, submitted an analysis. “I still find that suspicious. The dynamite is in cartridges that don’t need to be opened ever except to punch a hole in them and stick a blasting cap in them. But there are dynamite particles in many places. This is not right.” He concluded: “Something doesn’t add up here unless that evidence was salted.” Many of those initially rounded up tested positive for dynamite, only to be released with charges dropped immediately after Poindexter and Mondo were convicted.

Mondo remained an unbroken fighter against racial oppression until his last breath. Poindexter, who just turned 74, remains unbowed despite numerous health conditions, including recent triple-bypass heart surgery, no doubt exacerbated by nearly five decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment. He has earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is recognized as a caring mentor for fellow prisoners.

COINTELPRO was formally terminated two weeks after the conviction of the Omaha Two in the early 1970s. But it lives today not only in the ongoing imprisonment of a generation of Panthers and other fighters for black freedom but also in the surveillance, harassment and state terror directed against those who oppose depredations of racist American capitalism.

In 1974, a federal district court overturned Mondo’s conviction based on the illegal search of his house, a decision affirmed by a federal appellate court a year later. But in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case returned to Nebraska state court. The Nebraska Supreme Court then ruled that Mondo’s time to appeal had lapsed. Since 1993, Nebraska’s Parole Board has voted for the release of Poindexter and Mondo. However, the Nebraska Board of Pardons, made up of the governor, the attorney general and secretary of state, has refused to commute the life sentences to a term of years—a prerequisite to a grant of parole.

The FBI, cops and courts are core components of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to safeguard the bosses’ profit system through breaking strikes, terrorizing ghetto and barrio youth and repressing social protest. There will be no end to cop terror and racist frame-ups without getting rid of the capitalist system and its state through workers revolution. Ed Poindexter is an innocent man—Free him now!

*   *   *

Ed Poindexter is among the 11 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee, which is preparing to hold its 33rd annual Holiday Appeal fundraiser in support of this program. We first started providing stipends to Poindexter and Mondo in 1986. For more information about the PDC and its class-war prisoners fund, see www.partisandefense.org. You can write to Poindexter at: Ed Poindexter, 27767, 1-A-09, Nebraska State Penitentiary, P.O. Box 22500, Lincoln, NE 68542-2500.

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance  

By Josh Breslin  

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates  

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 

By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 

By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 

By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 

Honor Native American Heritage Month-Leonard Peltier: Victimized by Criminal Injustice - by Stephen Lendman-Free Leonard Peltier Now!

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Leonard Peltier: Victimized by Criminal Injustice

Leonard Peltier: Victimized by Criminal Injustice - by Stephen Lendman

A Leonard Peltier Defense Committee site can be accessed through the following link:

http://www.leonardpeltier.net/theman.htm

It calls him:

-- an artist;

-- writer;

-- great-grandfather;

-- 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nominee;

-- 2004 Peace and Freedom Party primary ballot presidential candidate nominee;

-- advocate of resolving all issues peacefully;

-- human and indigenous rights activist; and

-- wrongfully imprisoned political prisoner since 1976.

Peltier was framed, convicted and imprisoned for the deaths of two FBI agents, killed during a 1975 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota shoot-out. Though innocent, he's currently serving two consecutive life terms - not for murder, for activism.

A Free Leonard.org site covers facts about his case, accessed through the link below:

http://www.freeleonard.org/case/index.html

It says attorneys representing him filed FOIA requests to obtain previously unavailable government information. Federal obstruction so far prevents it to conceal disturbing revelations, proving his innocence.

Incarcerated since 1976, he's been denied parole, clemency, a pardon, due process justice on appeal, (including by the US Supreme Court), or retrial for serious prosecutorial and FBI irregularities, including fabricated evidence to frame him. More on it below.

The FBI also targeted him for assassination in prison. Moreover, he's been brutalized in solitary confinement numerous times, and at age 66, suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, heart and prostate problems, as well as other health issues.

Peltier, in fact, was targeted for being a Native American activist, a topic Ward Churchill addressed in numerous books and an article titled, "The Covert War Against Native Americans," saying:

Liberation organizations like the American Indian Movement (AIM), International Indian Treaty Council, and Women of All Red Nations struggle for Native American rights.

"In essence, their positions imply nothing less than the literal dismantlement of the modern (US) empire from the inside out. The stakes involved are tremendous," including treaty obligations denied, involving land, resources, human and civil rights.

By imprisoning "Native American freedom fighters," federal authorities "have been free to pursue programs of physical repression within America's internal colonies" like abroad.

"At one level, this has meant the wholesale jailing of the movement's leadership. Virtually every know AIM leader has been incarcerated in either state or federal prisons" since 1968 or earlier, "some repeatedly."

"This, in combination with accompanying time spent in local jails awaiting trial, the high costs of bail and legal defense," and time spent at trial is calculated malfeasance to wear down resistance, drain resources to pursue it, and "cripple (movement) strength."

Peltier is perhaps its best know victim, denied justice to isolate, silence, and let him rot behind prison bars unjustly.

1973 Wounded Knee Siege and Tragedy

Beginning February 27, 1973, it lasted 71 days, a confrontation between AIM activists v. FBI thugs and complicit Native American vigilantes - so-called "GOONS, (Guardians of Our Oglala Nation)," battling on the wrong side against their own.

In fact, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Tribal Council corruption, as well as out-of-control tension, got Lakota Nation elders to ask AIM for help. On February 27, armed Oglala Sioux reclaimed Wounded Knee, wanting their 1868 treaty rights honored.

It stated that "(t)he government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it." It also re-affirmed all Indian rights granted under the 1851 Treaty, abrogated and denied, nonetheless, like others.

Before the 1770s, the Great Sioux Nation held territories from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains and from the Yellowstone to Platte Rivers. Its famed leaders included Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Black Elk, among others.

Until the Treaty of 1868, they were the richest northwestern plains Native American nation. However, treaties made and broken changed their lives. Settlers, railroads, and mining interests stole their lands and resources. Now they wanted them back.

When AIM took over Wounded Knee, over 75 Indian Nations were represented, and more supporters arrived daily from around the country. Against them were GOONS, FBI thugs, federal marshals, and National Guard troops, surrounding and cutting them off, yet supporters still got through.

When it ended, an FBI/BIA "reign of terror" began. Lasting three years, roving death squads killed at least 342 AIM members and supporters. Hundreds more were harassed and beaten, and over 560 others arrested. Only 15 were convicted of a crime. Perhaps none, in fact, were guilty.

Brief Timeline of Peltier's Case

-- June 26, 1975: FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams killed at Wounded Knee;

-- February 6, 1976: Peltier arrested in Hinton, Alberta, Canada, then held for an extradition hearing;

-- June 18, 1976: he's ordered extradited to America;

-- March/April 1977: he's tried for killing Coler and Williams;

-- April 18, 1977: he's convicted on two counts of first-degree murder;

-- June 1, 1977: he's sentenced to two consecutive life terms in federal prison;

-- he's subsequently denied parole, retrial, clemency, a pardon, or justice on appeal.

Evidence of FBI and Prosecutorial Obstruction of Justice

-- witnesses were intimidated and coerced, including children;

-- key defense witnesses were prohibited from testifying;

-- evidence refuting conflicting ballistics reports was ruled inadmissible;

-- no one could identify Peltier as Coler and Williams' killer;

-- a climate of fear was created at trial;

-- evidence was fabricated;

-- exculpating evidence was withheld;

-- perjured testimonies and affidavits were used;

-- jury tampering was discovered;

-- FBI provocateurs gave GOONS illegal arms and ammunition to commit murder;

-- FBI and federal judges ex parte contact compromised Peltier's right to due process and judicial fairness; and

-- false inflammatory testimony was permitted at trial.

Overall, Department of Justice malfeasance framed Peltier, manipulating jurors to wrongfully convict him. In fact, authorities later admitted they weren't sure who killed Coler and Williams or if Peltier was involved. Moreover, hundreds of FBI-instigated "reign of terror" killings were never investigated. Government-sponsored killers remain free.

Amnesty International considers Peltier a political prisoner who "should be immediately and unconditionally released." Of course, he never should have been arrested, extradited, tried, convicted or imprisoned.

Governments, past and present congressional members, and hundreds of world dignitaries agree, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mikail Gorbachov, and former MP/anti-war activist Tony Benn.

Repressive Democrat and Republican leaders keep him imprisoned, waging war against truth, justice and democratic values ruthlessly, filling America's gulag with many thousands of innocent men, women and children.

A Final Comment

On June 26, part of a Peltier statement to friends and relations said:

"I always try to come to you full of good spirit and vigor. But I cannot lie. There are days when the ugliness of my situation weighs me down....I never thought this could happen. I never believed law enforcement and the government (would) keep their dirty laundry hidden away" this long.

Yet through dedicated efforts, "we have learned of hidden evidence, coerced testimony, and outright lies by the FBI and prosecutors....I am living proof that my case is about squashing Indian rights and Indian sovereignty."

Those responsible for framing him will live "their last moments (in) shame....If you believe in truth, justice, honor, freedom, all of what is supposed to make America great, then help me open the door to my release....join my cause....and do all you can to eradicate injustice."

Aho! Mitakuye Oyasin (All my relations, as part of a prayer for oneness and harmony with all forms of life)

Doksha (See you before long). Lakota has no word for goodbye.

Leonard Peltier

On June 27, he was placed in solitary confinement for six months. According to his attorney, Robert R. Bryan, it was for minor infractions, saying imprisonment weakened him, adding:

"Officials are using (excuses) to torture my 66-year-old client. His health is poor because of decades of imprisonment. It is an attempt to break and intimidate him."

In fact, they're trying to kill him. Currently incarcerated at US Penitentiary, Lewisburg, PA, he called his cell a "cement steel hotbox" with little ventilation. As a result, he's "drenched in hot sweat," Bryan saying he was put in a "hellhole."

He's there 23 hours a day weekdays, 24 hours on weekends, given no personal visits, and allowed to shower Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

That's how distinguished activists are treated in America, notably Muslims and people of color, including Native Americans, continuing a centuries long genocidal process.

Lewisburg is the oldest US federal prison. It's also one of the most notorious. Bureau of Prisons says it's now:

"run entirely as a Special Management Unit (SMU) as a more controlled and restrictive environment for managing the most aggressive and disruptive inmates from USP general population."

Though a model prisoner, Peltier was sent there before. According to Bryan:

"They're hoping he'll die there, that he'll be forgotten there" and perish, denied justice his friends and supporters worldwide won't ever quit fighting for. Nor will they let up condemning ruthless officials who destroy human beings for political advantage.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 12:57 AM

Honor Native American Heritage Month-From The Archives-The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.

Markin comment:

Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!

*Honor Native American Heritage Month- From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- The Song "Free Leonard Peltier"- Free Leonard Peltier Now!

*Click on the headline to link to the "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- Listen To The Bob Feldman Song "Free Leonard Peltier"- Free Leonard Peltier Now!

*Honor Native American Heritage Month- Those Who Fight For Native American Leader Leonard Peltier's Freedom Are Kindred Spirits- From The Pen Of Peter Matheissen

Click on title to link to a "The New York Review Of Books" article by writer Peter Matheisssen, "The Tragedy Of Leonard Peltier vs. The United States", detailing his long personal struggle to gain freedom for Native American leader Leonard Peltier. Hats off. Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Prison!

Honor Native American History Month- Bob Feldman 68: 'Free Leonard Peltier!'-A Guest Commentary- He Must Not Die In Jail

Click on the title to link to the "Bob Feldman 68" blog for a commentary on Leonard Peltier.

Markin comment:

This space had as one of its original intents,and continues to do so today, of propagandizing the plight of class war prisoners. Native American leader Leonard Peltier's story, without question, is a prime example of vagaries of the American 'justice' system. Those, like Bob Feldman, who publicize his case are kindred spirits. Again, Leonard Peltier must not die in jail!

Black Activist Railroaded for Self-Defense Free Siwatu-Salama Ra!

Workers Vanguard No. 1141	5 October 2018

Black Activist Railroaded for Self-Defense

Free Siwatu-Salama Ra!

The nightmare for Siwatu-Salama Ra, a 27-year-old black environmental activist in Detroit, began in July of last year. That was when Ra picked up her registered, unloaded handgun to fend off an attacker who was ramming her vehicle into Ra’s, which held her two-year-old daughter inside, and was attempting to run over both Ra and her mother. For the act of brandishing a weapon to protect herself and her family, Ra was outrageously convicted in March of this year of felony assault and firearm possession, and is serving a two-year prison sentence. Ra’s lawyers have filed an appeal of her sentence on the basis that she did not receive a fair trial. We demand: Overturn the conviction! Free Siwatu-Salama Ra now!

From her arrest to her imprisonment, Ra has faced racist, vindictive treatment for the simple fact that she is a black woman who tried to defend herself. Despite the fact that the gun had no bullets, that she was legally armed, and that Michigan is a concealed carry and Stand Your Ground state, this made absolutely no difference to the cops, prosecutors and judge. The cops justified charging Ra and not the woman who attacked her on the ridiculous pretext that her assailant had filed a police report first. When Ra maintained that she had a legal right to self-defense and refused a plea deal, the prosecution retaliated by slapping the felony firearms charge onto the assault charge, which meant she got a two-year mandatory sentence instead of probation. The appeal by Ra’s lawyers exposes the mockery of a trial: the judge instructed the jury that pointing an unloaded gun constituted “deadly force” and blocked the defense from revealing how Ra’s attacker had a strong motivation to lie given that she was on probation for an earlier assault.

After her conviction, the judge denied motions that then-pregnant Ra be allowed to serve her sentence after giving birth. Ra was imprisoned in the final months of a high-risk pregnancy and shackled during medical examinations. In May, Ra gave birth to a baby boy, under confinement and without any family present. Her husband was not informed of the birth for two days, at which point Ra was separated from her newborn child. Such cruel abuse is endured by women prisoners around the country. Ra has also been victimized in prison for being a Muslim—denied halal meals, a copy of the Koran and a headscarf to wear during prayers.

Among the ludicrous assertions made by the prosecution at her trial was that Ra’s self-defense claim was baseless because Ra had purportedly shown no fear when she was being attacked. As Ra said: “The prosecutor convinced the jury and judge that I lacked fear and that’s not true. I was so afraid, especially for my toddler and mother. I don’t believe they could imagine a black woman being scared—only mad” (Detroit Metrotimes, 2 April). Meanwhile, killer cops and racist vigilantes who gun down black people in cold blood routinely get away with murder by invoking “fear” for their lives as a defense. That was how George Zimmerman walked free after killing black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. The Chicago cop who killed black youth Laquan McDonald in 2014 also claimed “fear for his life” as his defense.

Anything from sitting to driving to being at home “while black” can invite a potentially lethal encounter with the police, who aren’t about to tolerate black people with guns. The racist U.S. ruling class is haunted by the specter of an armed black population. When Philando Castile told a Minnesota cop who pulled him over in 2016 that he had a legal firearm in his vehicle, he was blown away in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. In July, Harith “Snoop” Augustus was killed by Chicago cops while appearing to show them his Firearm Owners Identification card. Even a toy gun is enough of a pretext for the cops to gun down a black child, such as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

As Marxists, we uphold the right of armed self-defense, a necessity for the working class, black people and the populace as a whole. We oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black elected officials. Gun legislation only serves to preserve the monopoly of armed force in the hands of the racist capitalist state, an instrument of violence to uphold the brutal system of exploitation. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of the cops, criminals, strikebreakers and Klansmen, taking them out of the hands of the working and oppressed masses.

Ra’s conviction makes crystal clear that Stand Your Ground laws are not applicable to black people, whose oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism. They are meant to sanction only white, racist vigilantism and the wanton murder of black people and other minorities. We oppose Stand Your Ground which, as we wrote following the killing of Trayvon Martin, “allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a ‘reasonable belief’ that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim ‘reasonable belief’ of danger” (“Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America,” WV No. 999, 30 March 2012). A study by the Urban Institute found that 34 percent of Stand Your Ground cases involving white people killing black people are deemed justifiable, and only 3 percent when the shooter is black and the victim white.

The railroading of Siwatu-Salama Ra is another reminder that black people have no rights that the racist capitalist rulers are bound to respect. The reality is that over 150 years after the slavocracy was defeated in the Civil War, basic citizenship rights are still withheld from much of the black population. The liberation of black people can be realized only by the destruction of the capitalist system through socialist revolution.

*   *   *

The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—has donated to Siwatu-Salama Ra’s legal defense, and urges others to do so. To donate, go to: actionnetwork.org/fundraising/freesiwatu.

Honor Native American Heritage Month- Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail

Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story, Leonard Peltier, various leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), defense attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and by-standers, directed by Michael Apted, 1991

Let’s start this review of this documentary of the incidents surrounding the case of Leonard Peltier at the end. Or at least the end of this documentary, 1991. Leonard Peltier, a well-known leader of the Native American movement, convicted of the 1975 murder, execution-style, of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota after he had been extradited from Canada in the wake of the acquittal of two other Pine Ridge residents. In an interview from federal prison in that period the then still relatively young Peltier related that after receiving his life sentences and being told by prison officials that that meant his release date would be in 2035 he stated that he hoped not, for he would then be an old, old man. Here is what should make everyone interested in the case, and everyone interested in the least sense of justice, even just bourgeois justice, blood boil, he is now an old sick man and he is still in jail for a crime that he did not commit, and certainly one that was not proven beyond that cherished “reasonable doubt”

This documentary, narrated by Robert Redford in his younger days as well, goes step by step through the case from the pre-murder period when Native Americans, catching the political consciousness crest begun in the 1960s by the black civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, started organizing, mainly through the American Indian Movement (AIM), on the Indian reservations of the West, some of the most impoverished areas in all the Americas. The focal point of this militant organizing effort came in the war zone-showdown, the siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. The tension that hovered in the air in the aftermath of that war between the American government and its Indian agent supporters on one side, and the AIM-led “warrior nation” on the other is the setting for this incident at Ogala.

Through reenactment of the crime scene; eye witnesses, interested and disinterested, voluntary or coerced; defense strategies at both trials from self-defense to lack of physical evidence, and on appeal; the prosecution's case, its insufficient evidence, and it various maneuvers to inflame white juries against unpopular or misunderstood Native Americans in order to get someone convicted for the murders of one of their own; the devastating, but expected effect of the trials on the political organizing by AIM; and the stalwart and defiant demeanor of one Leonard Peltier all come though in this presentation. As a long time supporter of organizations that defend class-war prisoners, like Leonard Peltier, this film only makes that commitment even firmer. With that in mind- Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Jail!