Free Angela and All Political Prisoners Page #7

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is this whole question of crime.

What does it mean to be

a criminal in this society?

George had a younger brother, Jonathan,

who was about 16, I think,

when I first met him.

He was an incredible writer,

and wrote for his school newspaper,

and wrote articles about his brother

and the Soledad Brothers' case.

I think he was totally devastated

that his brother had been

behind bars for 10 years.

I came to realize that

the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee

was really a lifeline for him.

He needed to have some hope

that the person he most identified

with in life

was one day going to be free.

In San Rafael, California,

north of San Francisco,

a judge and three other persons

were shot to death today

in an attempt

by a group of convicts to escape.

Judge Harold Haley was hearing the case

of a San Quentin inmate

when an unidentified man armed

with dynamite and an automatic weapon

entered the courtroom.

The defendant, along with

two other inmates testifying for him,

reportedly joined with the unidentified man

in rounding up the judge, a deputy

district attorney and three women jurors.

When it was over, Judge Haley was dead,

the deputy district attorney

had been critically wounded in the back,

one woman juror was wounded in the arm,

two of the inmates were dead,

as was the unidentified man.

I could not deal with the fact that

this young man,

who was 17 at the time,

that he ends up lying on the cold cement

in a parking lot

in one of the most wealthy counties

in the country.

The funeral for Superior Judge

Harold Haley was a major civic event.

The cortege escorted by a detail of

60 police officers

from cities all over the San Francisco Bay.

Judge Haley, after all, was a prominent man.

And his death deeply shocked

and angered his peers.

His kidnappers,

they described as hoodlums,

who called themselves revolutionaries.

Across the Bay in Oakland, there was

another funeral for Jonathan Jackson,

the young Panther who was supposed to

have staged the bloody kidnap attempt.

I, and my husband,

we went to Jonathan's funeral.

Everybody in their Sunday best,

many people weeping.

When they brought the casket out,

and Mrs. Jackson followed,

people holding her up

and a handkerchief to her face.

And it said to me, what he had done

represented something.

'Cause that was thousands

and thousands of people

out there in the street.

Nobody organized that. People just came.

While we were standing there,

Franklin comes up, Franklin Alexander.

We were standing in such a way

that he was next to us,

but looking straight,

as though he wasn't talking to us.

And he said, "Angela's been implicated."

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