See how these lying demons are trying to tie these Bros. to yet another murder case!
(https://www.abibitumikasa.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi464.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr9%2Fnattyreb%2Fco-sanfran8-1.jpg&hash=162d118629376c48cfa7e17b9c30363661b9af73) (http://s464.photobucket.com/albums/rr9/nattyreb/?action=view¤t=co-sanfran8-1.jpg)
Pictured: (left to right) members of the San Francisco 8 Hank Jones, the late John Bowman (front), Ray Boudreaux, Harold Taylor and Richard Brown.
GET INVOLVED!
via: Free the SF 8!
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PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD FAR AND WIDE!
SF 8 PRELIMINARY HEARING STARTS MONDAY JUNE 8
8 AM RALLY TO DROP THE CHARGES
9 AM COURT HEARING
850 Bryant St. @ 7th., San Francisco
The SF 8 are Black community elders and activists arrested in January 2007 on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. The case against the SF8 is a frame up based on torture-induced "confessions" and fabricated evidence. The same case was thrown out of court 30 years ago but was revived after 9/11 with money from Homeland Security. After two and a half long years, the preliminary hearing is finally starting on June 8 and is expected to last for three months. The hearing will determine whether or not the SF8 will go to trial.
In an effort to bolster the very weak case against the SF8, the San Francisco Chronicle just published a sensationalistic article filled with racist innuendos and unsubstantiated implications. Without offering one shred of evidence, the article (John Koopman, 5/24) implies that the murder of a young white woman in 1971 is somehow linked to the SF8. We must demand that the Chronicle and other corporate media stop circulating such blatant misinformation!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/23/MNU217OU14.DTL (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/23/MNU217OU14.DTL)
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:
• Attend court during the preliminary hearing from June to September
• Sign the open letter demanding that Attorney General Jerry Brown drop the charges against the SF8 - http://www.freethesf8.org/what_to_do.html (http://www.freethesf8.org/what_to_do.html)
• Write the SF Chronicle demanding that they retract Koopman's inflammatory article (letters@sfchronicle.com)
• Invite a speaker from the SF 8 Defense Committee to your school or organization
• Donate to support the work to free the SF8 - http://www.freethesf8.org/donate.html (http://www.freethesf8.org/donate.html)
• Sign up to get regular information and updates about the SF8 case - http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/listinfo/CDHRsupport_freedomarchives.org (http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/listinfo/CDHRsupport_freedomarchives.org)
FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL 415-226-1120 OR GO TO WWW.FREETHESF8.ORG (http://www.freethesf8.org)
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I sent a letter to the Chronicle yesterday regarding their terrible article. Although they may not publish any letters, I think it would be good for as many people as possible to send a quick message expressing outrage over their article. This could help get a meeting with them or support effort to get an op ed supportive of the 8 published. Letters can be sent to letters@sfchronicle.com (mailto:letters@sfchronicle.com) or through their website comments section.
Below are letters from Stuart Hanlon & Michael Lyon which they sent and could help people frame their comments although I don't think each letter needs to be that detailed since the point is more to register our disgust.
Diana Block
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From Stuart Hanlon, attorney for Herman Bell
I am one of the attorneys for the seven former Black Panthers charged with the 1971 murder of a S.F. police officer. Your article "Idealist Slaying Still Haunts Today," not only is misleading , but contains outright lies and is based on nothing but the speculation of your writer or others who know nothing about this case
We have received hundred of thounited snakesnds of pages of evidence and there is no evidence whatsoever that links this young woman to the killing of Sgt Young, or her killing to those seven men facing charges, or the Black Panther Party or any other organization connected in any way to the case. Yet your article says she was likely involved and that the seven men facing charges are responsible for her death.
It is difficult to imagine any reason why you would print such an article filled with these false innuendos linking the sad and tragic death of this young woman with this group of men facing a trial for something that happened close to forty years ago other than a blatant attempt to bias the prospective jury pool against the seven men on trial. It is difficult enough to get a fair trial thirty-eight years after a crime, when evidence is destroyed, witnesses dead or senile, and all memories faded by time and age. Your article makes the possibility of a fair trial even more remote.
This case is being prosecuted by the Attorney General of California and investigated by the FBI and SF police department. They don't need any more help trying to falsely convict these men from a biased and misinformed writer and a paper that cares nothing about truth or justice.
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Editor,
Your sensationalist May 24 article, “Idealist’s slaying in ’71 still haunts today,” shows just how baseless the State’s prosecution of the SF8 for the 1971 killing of a SF policeman is. This prosecution is based only on “confessions” tortured out of the defendants by New Orleans police in 1973, but the Chronicle shamelessly helps prosecute the case by insinuating that the SF8 also killed a young woman whom the Chronicle says cooperated in the policeman’s killing. The story says a woman was discovered murdered 37 years ago in Stanislaus County, but gives questionable evidence that she is missing Panther sympathizer Mary Alice Willey, and no evidence that the woman who entered the Ingleside Station to file a stolen purse police report before the killing was Willey, or even an accomplice at all. It’s all spin. This entire SF8 case, with its missing murder weapon, its misplaced records on fingerprints which failed to implicate the SF8, and its DNA evidence which fails to implicate the SF8, is a plan to promote racist conspiracy theories, in hopes of stalling future movements against police brutality and burying the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Drop the charges against the SF8 in their Preliminary Hearing on June 8th.
Michael Lyon
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San Francisco 8 Members Blame Murder Charges on Police Corruption
http://www.lawattstimes.com/life-and-style-mainmenu-31/arts-a-culture/737-san-francisco-8-members-blame-murder-charges-on-police-corruption.html (http://www.lawattstimes.com/life-and-style-mainmenu-31/arts-a-culture/737-san-francisco-8-members-blame-murder-charges-on-police-corruption.html)
CRUEL AND UNUSUAL Hank Jones and Ray Boudreaux spoke before the Pasadena ACLU May 12 to tell the story of the “San Francisco 8,” former members and/or associates of the Black Panther Party who have been charged with the 1970 killing of a San Francisco police officer. The case against the men, initially dismissed in 1975 because confessions from some of them had been based on torture, was reopened in 2007.
May 21, 2009
BY NADRA KAREEM
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
A pair of men awaiting trial for their alleged involvement in the 1971 murder of San Francisco Police Sgt. John Young declared their innocence at the May 12 meeting in Pasadena.
In 2007, Ray Boudreaux, 64, and Hank Jones, 70, were two of eight men charged with murder and conspiracy in connection with the decades-old murder. Although a San Francisco judge dismissed the indictments against the “San Francisco 8” in 1975 and ’76, the case was reopened based on the prosecution’s claims of new evidence linking the men to the killing. But Boudreaux and Jones argue that authorities targeted them as murder suspects due to their involvement with the Black Panther Party in the 1970s.
“COINTELPRO was pivotal in pitting the Black Panther Party and police against each other,” Jones said during his visit to the Pasadena-Foothill American Civil Liberties Union.
COINTELPRO is an acronym for the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program.
Although the Black Panther Party acquired a reputation for being a militant group, Boudreaux and Jones, both Altadena residents now, said that it served the community’s needs at the time. Boudreaux was involved in the party’s free breakfast program, and Jones was an active member.
“There would have never been a Black Panther Party had there not been … racism … discrimination,” Jones said. But the federal government “used the police to quiet the unrest in the black community.”
He argued that the Black Panther Party enjoyed widespread community support until COINTELPRO, he says, launched a misinformation campaign about the group, often casting them as violent aggressors instead of a group focused on self-defense.
On June 8, the “San Francisco 8” will have a preliminary hearing related to the cold case. Then, Boudreaux anticipates a favorable outcome.
“We expect the case to be dismissed sometime during this preliminary hearing,” he said. “Many of the motions to have the case dismissed by the judge were put off to the preliminary hearing.”
In Spring 2008, five of the defendants were cleared of conspiracy charges because the statute of limitations had run out. This completely cleared one of the eight Richard O’Neal as a defendant in the case because he was only charged with conspiracy and not murder. At the preliminary hearing, defense attorneys will seek to have conspiracy charges against the remaining three men dismissed.
In addition to O’Neal, Boudreaux and Jones, the remaining defendants include Francisco Torres, Harold Taylor, Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim (formerly Anthony Bottom).
Asked by an audience member if each member of the “San Francisco 8” was innocent, Boudreaux insisted that was the case. “We had nothing to do with it,” he said.
Both he and Jones claim that confessions obtained by the police from the ’70s about the murder resulted from torture.
Police coercion factored in a judge’s decision to dismiss charges against the men in the ’70s. Now that the case has been reopened, Jones said he felt the prosecution was “… looking for a face-saving way out of this.”
Jones said that no new evidence ties the men to the case.
“They say they have weapons,” he said. “There are no weapons.”
Jones and Boudreaux also said that before their murder arrests, some of the eight men did not know each other.
Although his political activism may have factored into why he was targeted as a suspect in the original case, Jones said he has no regrets over his involvement in the Black Panther Party.
“I’ve been an activist since the murder of Emmett Till in 1955,” he said. Till was a teenage boy from Chicago who was killed by white men for allegedly making a pass at a white woman in Mississippi.
“His mother was wise enough to leave that casket open,” Jones said of Till. “It affected me. Before then, I was a Marine, apolitical. I’ve been an activist ever since, and I’ll die one.”
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Please support these brothers by sending a donation. Make checks payable to CDHR/Agape and mail to the address below or donate on line:
www.freethesf8.org/donate.html (http://www.freethesf8.org/donate.html)
Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR)
PO Box 90221
Pasadena, CA 91109
(415) 226-1120
FreetheSF8@riseup.net (mailto:FreetheSF8@riseup.net)
www.freethesf8.org (http://www.freethesf8.org)