The Focus Blurs on the Trial in New Haven

IT IS going on four months since Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins went on trial for their lives in New Haven. You don't read much about the case in the papers any more, and most days not many people show up to observe the trial.

In fact, all you are likely to see in the papers is articles like this one, telling you how everyone has stopped caring and reporting. And on a typical day last week, no one who showed up to witness what John Froines last spring called the "focus of the whole country" was turned away, despite very limited seating in Judge Harold Mulvey's Court of Common Pleas.

Last spring, when 15,000 people showed up in New Haven to demand that Seale and Huggins be freed, was truly the heyday of the Panthers and their white radical supporters. Since then, for a variety of reasons, things have gone downhill-perhaps for good.

After two years of constant police harassment-legal and otherwise-have decimated its leadership, the Black Panther Party seems in city after city to have fallen into disarray.

Huey P. Newton, who founded the Party with Seale in 1966, is out of jail now-free on bail pending appeal of his manslaughter conviction. Although during his imprisonment the Panthers virtually canonized him, and expected him to revitalize the Party, Newton has not proved the vital leader the Party needs.

While Newton was in jail, Seale waged a national campaign to mobilize support for him, and he thus claims responsibility for the fact that Newton was not convicted of first-degree murder-the original charge against him in the 1968 slaying of a California policeman. Now when Newton is free and Seale is on trial, the latest news of Newton in the white press is that he is living in a $700 a month San Francisco apartment, in a "high-security" building.

While popular support for the Panthers as a whole has waned-perhaps because there has been less and less to support-support for Seale, Huggins, and other New Haven Panthers arrested for the 1969 kidnapping-torture-murder of Alex Rackley also seems passe.

It is hard to say whether this is due to the general decline of radical political activity, or to a disillusionment with the Panthers, or perhaps to a growing suspicion that Seale and Huggins may not be innocent. They are charged with conspiracy to kidnap and murder Rackley. Seale is also charged with flight to avoid prosecution.

The 15,000 who converged on New Haven last May loudly denounced the police contention that Bobby Seale as Panther chairman had ordered Rackey, a member of the New York Chapter, executed as a police informer. Also, these white supporters felt, like Yale's President Kingman Brewster, that it was impossible for a black revolutionary to get a fair trial anywhere in America.

However, the months since May Day have seen another New Haven Panther, Lonnie McLucas, receive what seemed to be a fair trial, at least by the standards of normal criminal justice. McLucas was convicted on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 15 years-largely on the testimony of George Sams, Loretta Luckas, and Warren Kimbro, other Panthers who had been indicted in the crime and then turned state's evidence.

McLucas' lawyer has readily admitted that the verdict, and the sentence, were mere compromises, and he has referred to his client rather derisively as "malleable," and a "schnoop." Throughout the trial the defense played down the political aspects of the case and symbolically McLucas dressed constantly in a coat and tie.

The picture sticks in the popular mind of an orderly and conclusive judicial procedure. The McLucas trial has helped defuse mass support for Seale and Huggins. It will also affect the outcome of their case in more direct ways.

A SIGNIFICANT but little-noticed fact is that the McLucas trial did not establish the credibility of George Sams, the key prosecution witness in Seale's case. Sams alone testifies that Seale ordered Rackley's death. Kimbro, Luckes, and McLucas all denied this on the stand at McLucas' trial.

The Panthers claim that Sams is a police agent who engineered the murder of Alex Rackley, a Party member in good standing, in order to destroy the New Haven Chapter. The prosecution admits that it was Sams who actually commanded Kimbro and McLucas to abduct and shoot Rackley-allegedly on orders from "headquarters."

Sams' credibility is further undermined by his history of mental instability and defectiveness, and by his alternately violent and laughable career as a Party member. Several times Sams was saved from expulsion only by the intervention of Stokely Carmichael, the Partys one-time Minister of Foreign Affairs for whom he had been a bodyguard.

Nevertheless, Sams, who was found "stable and intelligent enough to give reliable testimony" by a court-ordered psychiatric examination last summer, will testify against Seale and Huggins.

The cornerstone of the prosecution case against Huggins will be a tape recorder, which was also used as evidence against McLucas. Supposedly made the night of Rackley's murder, it allegedly contains the voice of Ericka Huggins making self-incriminatory statements.

The fact that so much of the evidence to be used against Seale and Huggins has already been used against McLucas-and, in a sense, "verified" by his conviction-has influenced the popular attitude towards their case, and may affect its outcome. In one way, the "popular attitude" has already begun to shape the trial.

The last three months have been spent selecting a jury to try Seale and Huggins-three months in which public interest has lagged. Over 900 potential jurors, drawn from the area's rolls of registered voters, have been screened, and only ten have been approved by the court, the prosecution, and the defense and then been empaneled. Many of the rest have been found to be overexposed to the immense publicity surrounding the case.

Each of the panels of 50 jurors considered at a time has been disposed of in a predictable way. A certain portion fail to appear in court at all, either willfully or because the jurors have moved away, died, etc. Then a certain portion is excused by the court on account of the financial or personal hardship which would result from jury duty.

Those who do appear are given a long, rather fatherly introductory lecture by Judge Harold M. Mulvey on the legal procedures to be followed in the case and on certain of the principles involved, such as the importance of presuming the accused innocent until proven guilty.

As many of the potential jurors are nervous about the prospect of becoming involved in a notorious trial, Mulvey reassures them that "I'll be right there sitting beside you just in case anyone gets out of line." Nevertheless, on occasion, women jurors have burst into floods of tears at the first glance from Charles Garry, Seale's lawyer.

Most of them have heard or read quite a bit about Garry, who has defended so many Panthers on so many charges all over the country that the Party calls him the only true "White Panther."

THE questioning begins. The prosecutor, Garry, and Huggins' lawyer, Catherine Roraback of New Haven, probe the juror's attitudes-whether it is a deep-seated prejudice or an opinion formed by reading the evening paper-towards the case, the defendants, and the Panthers in general.

Unlike McLucas' lawyer, Garry and, to a lesser extent, Roraback play up the involvement of the Panthers in the case, and the trial's political nature. Garry even takes every opportunity to remind the juror of the connection, introducing himself time and time again as, "representing Mr. Seale, co-founder and chairman of the Black Panther Party."

Thus Garry and Roraback have established the jurors' opinions of the Panthers as issues in the selection. Opinions of police and black people in general as well as acquaintance with parties involved in the case are also issues. Once the defense lawyers or the prosecution has ascertained that the juror is prejudiced, they either use one of their peremptory challenges, or convince Judge Mulvey that he should be excused.

The prosecuting attorneys seem to assume that a juror is "safe" unless something-if, for example, he is black-makes them sit up and take notice. As of last week, the state's attorney's office had used only 30 of its allowance of 60 peremptory challenges, while Garry and Roraback had used all but one of theirs.

Scores and scores of jurors are excused immediately because they watch the evening news or read the daily paper and have formed opinions about the case. Of course, many of those who profess to have opinions may be merely trying to avoid an unpleasant duty. And many of those who deny being prejudiced may have an ulterior motive for getting on the jury.

Many jurors are excused by the judge after a brief questioning because they state, for example, that they would need to hear some evidence to prove that Huggins and Seale were not involved in the Rackley slaying. It is clear as these people leave the courtroom that they have no conception of why they were excused, that they see no contradiction between their statements and Judge Mulvey's careful admonition about the presumption of innocence.

Those jurors who survive these tests undergo fairly intensive questioning, usually from the defense:

"Where did you live before you lived in Waterbury?"

"Do you know any of these people [a list of perhaps 12 names]?"

"Are you personal friends with any policemen?"

"Have you seen any of these articles [major articles in The New Yorker, New York, Reader's Digest, etc. ]?"

Charles Garry said last week, "You know right away whom you don't want." Thus often the defense questioning is geared towards "trapping" the juror into admitting to the court some prejudice or experience which is predictable to the sympathetic observer.

Last week when I visited the trial, the defense was left with only one precious peremptory challenge, and the pressure was immense to "trap" the hostile juror into making a statement which would give the court cause to excuse him. The very last member of one panel of 50 jurors was a college-educated supervisor at Schick-Eversharp Razor, a company which is currently engaged in making a film about the Panthers. This man, a member of the National Rifle Association, had talked to colleagues who had been excused for cause, for being, among other things, too involved with the making of the film.

Obviously a poor risk for Seale and Huggins.... A true undercover agent.... Yet although Garry and Roraback questioned him for almost an hour, this juror refused to admit that he had been exposed to any publicity, that he had any opinions whatsoever, that his various connections would prejudice him in any way. At last Garry was forced to use his last challenge to get rid of him. As he left the courtroom, the juror smirked at Seale as if to say, "You may have kept me off your jury but I sure did some damage in the process."

That day in court one juror was selected, however. The policewoman who searched my body and my belongings for unidentified dangerous objects as I entered the courtroom commented later that I must have brought everyone luck. The tenth juror was a true case of American Blind Justice-a black woman who had a problem with her eyes which prevented her from reading the newspaper and thus insulated her from pre-trial publicity.

After using the last of its challenges the defense planned to move for an end to jury selection, on the basis that there is no statutory requirement for a jury of twelve. It is probable that they will fare about as well with this motion as they did with their challenge to the method by which the grand jury which indicted the Panthers was selected.

That motion failed; it was based on the proposition that the grand jury did not constitute a "jury of peers" because it was predominantly middleaged and white. Under normal selection procedure, potential jurors must be registered voters and permanent residents. This fact alone might preclude the selection of "peers" of the Panthers as jurors, but the grand jury was also made up almost exclusively of friends of the sheriff, the prosecutors, etc.

If the defense motion fails, jury selection will drag on for several more weeks before the actual trial begins, and before there will be a chance that public interest in the case will resume. If and when Seale and Huggins again enjoy mass support, the essential political nature of their trial will be spotlighted.

However, for anyone who bothers to make that trip to New Haven during the calm before the storm, the heavily charged political atmosphere is obvious, despite the courtroom decorum, mostly enforced by Seale and Huggins, partly out of pragmatism and partly out of a grudging respect for Judge Mulvey, who seems to try very hard to maintain his high standards of criminal justice and yet to make them fit this unusual case.

The politics are obvious as Seale and Huggins enter the courtroom and raise the clenched fist to the cluster of observers; as Garry hammers home Seale's political history; as the prosecutor asks the potential jurors what they think of the Panthers' Ten-Point Program; as the dozens of jurors move through the courtroom like the Silent Majority on parade. The politics are obvious as the observers endure the body searches; they band together in sharing food, drinks, books, chairs, worry about how thin and wane Huggins has become, worshipfully note Seale's daily state of mind, and then reflect it, scurry out of the courtroom at the end of the day to catch a last glimpse of the defendants being led away.

The politics are obvious in the way Seale and Huggins have been treated in jail, in the way that even Mulvey seems powerless to order any real change in their enforced life-style.

Charles Garry commented last week, "I'm tired, I'm awfully tired.... If the Panthers were doing their job right, they wouldn't need me."

A member of the Panther Defense Committee replied, "These things take time; one of these days you'll be out of a job."

"I don't know. I only hope so. I can't wait," Garry answered.

Members of the Panther Defense Committee say that Garry has admitted that he has no hope of winning the case in the courtroom, and claims that the only solution is in the streets. As Newton was helped, so the story goes, so will Seale and Huggins be freed. Otherwise, the best hope is a compromise verdict like McLucas' as opposed to the electric chair.

Perhaps the story is true; perhaps Garry is right; perhaps no matter how hard the good liberals like Judge Mulvey try, a square peg won't fit into a round hole, a political trial won't try like an ordinary criminal one. But will the liberals, who would care if they could be convinced, and the conservatives, who wouldn't, be convinced by marching in the streets when the jury comes back? Will Seale and Huggins go free?