December 4, 2000
Ex-Panther Sues Defiant Police for 19-Year Imprisonment
By ALAN FEUER
Nancy Siesel/The New York Times
Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, a former Black Panther leader, says
a government conspiracy framed him for the machine-gunning of two police
officers in 1971. He was freed in 1990 after his conviction was reversed.
Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad has been itching for 25 years to tell his
story in open court. His claims that the authorities wrongly convicted him
for the attempted murder of two New York City police officers, then stuck
him in a cell for nearly 19 years, have been around since the era when Huey
P. Newton was raising his fist in a call for black power.
His lawsuit against the city for malicious prosecution and false
imprisonment harks back to the days when the black power movement and the
law clashed violently on the streets of New York, the days when some of
Manhattan's elite passed the hat for legal expenses for radicals who
maintained that federal agents and city officers were engaged in a plot to
infiltrate and silence them.
This week, nearly three decades after that raw era, Mr. Wahad, a former
leader of the Black Panther Party, will present his case: that the Police
Department framed him in the machine-gunning of the two officers on
Riverside Drive in 1971.
"We have a jury here that we have to educate," Mr. Wahad said during an
hourlong telephone interview on Friday. "We have to show them that the
police would really do what they did to me. This isn't some sci-fi movie,
some kind of history show on PBS. This is for real. They actually did this
stuff to me."
Mr. Wahad, now 56, was known as Richard Moore when he was a field
lieutenant for the Black Panthers and a circulation manager for the party's
daily newspaper during the Vietnam War era. He now lives in Ghana, where he
runs cultural programs for West African youth, managing a pair of hip-hop
groups and working with a local dance troupe.
In United States District Court in Manhattan tomorrow, Mr. Wahad will seek
$15 million in damages and argue that the Police Department and federal
agents worked together to deprive him of his constitutional rights by
manipulating evidence in his case.
Lawyers for the police, on the other hand, will argue that there was no
conspiracy to implicate Mr. Wahad, and that he did, in fact, gun down the
two police officers, Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti, who, the lawyers
say, were maimed but survived.
But there will be a third palpable presence in the courtroom: history,
which has left its imprint on the case, even as memories have faded and
witnesses have vanished or died.
It is a history that began May 19, 1971, when Officers Curry and Binetti
were wounded in a burst of machine-gun fire while standing guard outside
the home of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank S. Hogan. On July 30,
1971, Mr. Wahad was indicted on charges of attempted murder.
Mr. Wahad's first trial ended in a hung jury; his second in a mistrial. But
in a third trial, in 1973, Mr. Wahad was convicted by a jury that
deliberated for less than an hour, and was sentenced to 25 years to life.
In December 1975, papers in the lawsuit say, Mr. Wahad learned that
Congressional hearings had disclosed the existence of a covert F.B.I.
operation known as Cointelpro, a Nixon-era counterintelligence program that
sought to disrupt and discredit the Black Panthers and other radical
movements.
Mr. Wahad filed a federal lawsuit against the F.B.I. and the city that
month, arguing that he was a victim of the smear campaign and that the
F.B.I. and the New York police had worked together to spread dissension
within the Black Power movement. The suit said that the authorities had
dipped into a bag of dirty tricks that included illegal wiretaps, office
burglaries and the dissemination of inflammatory lies by agents who
infiltrated the movement.
As a result of Mr. Wahad's suit, the F.B.I. slowly released more than
300,000 pages of secret documents about Cointelpro, including an internal
memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director. In the memo, which
recounted a long conversation with President Richard M. Nixon about the
shooting of the two New York officers, Hoover ordered his top aides "not to
pull any punches in going all out" to solve the shooting, including setting
up a special team to work with the New York police.
The F.B.I. records showed that the police and prosecutors failed to give
Mr. Wahad's lawyers crucial information for his defense. The critical item
that was withheld, the defense lawyers contend, was a tape-recorded
anonymous telephone call by a woman to the police, saying that Mr. Wahad
was not involved in the shooting. Through the F.B.I. documents, Mr. Wahad's
lawyers learned that the woman who made the phone call had been identified
as Pauline Joseph, who, as a witness for the prosecution, implicated Mr.
Wahad.
Mr. Wahad used these records and others to appeal his conviction, and on
March 15, 1990, a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan reversed it,
ruling that the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence that could have
helped Mr. Wahad's defense.
In 1995, the Manhattan district attorney's office decided not to retry Mr.
Wahad, saying that it could no longer make a case against him because so
much time had passed.
About 20 years after Mr. Wahad had filed his lawsuit, the F.B.I. settled,
for $400,000. The city did not.
"The bottom line is that he did it," said Daniel S. Connolly, a lawyer in
the corporation counsel's office. "Our position is that there was no
conspiracy and that this was not a malicious prosecution. The crime that he
is alleged to have committed, he did, in fact, commit."
The documents in the case read like a history chapter on black radicalism.
An affidavit signed by Robert J. Boyle, Mr. Wahad's lawyer, for example,
begins with a brief retelling of intelligence operations that focused on
the Black Power movement, including references to the 1969 Panther 21
trial. The case was based on the testimony of three undercover police
officers who infiltrated the Black Panther Party and said they had
uncovered a conspiracy to blow up department stores and the New York
Botanical Garden, bomb police stations and kill police officers. All 21
defendants, including Mr. Wahad, were acquitted in 1971.
Efforts to reach Officers Curry and Binetti through city lawyers and
through the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association were unsuccessful. But city
lawyers said that they never fully recovered from their injuries.
The march of time has not dulled the intensity that Mr. Wahad feels about
his case. His conversational style is quick and aphoristic, then suddenly
professorial. In one breath, he says he wants to spit on the graves of the
officers who wronged him; in another, he delivers a rambling lecture on the
dangers of globalism or the disenfranchisement of black voters in this
year's presidential election.
"I think given the facts of my false conviction, the truth will eventually
prevail," he said. "The jury will see that the New York district attorney's
office suborned perjury, withheld evidence and maliciously prosecuted me. I
can at least tell the story of what happened to people like myself. And
that's the most important lesson I can teach."
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