May 21, 2009

BY NADRA KAREEM

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

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.”