Former Black Panther get $490,000 for wrongful imprisonment ASSOCIATED PRESS 12.08.00 | NEW YORK -- Ending a 25-year legal battle, the city has agreed to pay $490,000 to a former Black Panther who claimed he was wrongly imprisoned for 19 years for the attempted murder of two police officers. The settlement with Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad was reached just before his civil rights lawsuit was to go to trial in federal court Thursday. The city admitted no wrongdoing. Wahad, known as Richard Moore when he was a field secretary for the Panthers, was charged in 1971 with shooting and wounding two officers whose job was to guard the home of the Manhattan district attorney. Wahad's 1973 conviction was overturned in 1990 when a judge ruled that the government had failed to turn over evidence to the defense. In the course of his lawsuit, filed in 1975, Wahad obtained more than 300,000 pages of FBI documents that he said showed the government's attempt to discredit the Panthers and other groups. The documents, he said, showed that he had been prosecuted maliciously. Wahad, 56, has lived in Ghana since he was freed.
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