The Assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas

Author:Jeffrey Haas [Haas, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-56976-365-0
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2011-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

In 1974, PLO was in its fifth year. Our clients included the Attica Brothers, Puerto Rican Independentistas, the Hampton plaintiffs, and the antiwar movement. Arthur Kinoy said that movement lawyers had to be twice as good because we started with the judicial system against us. Charles Garry, the Panther lawyer in San Francisco, said he was a better lawyer than Perry Mason because Mason’s clients were innocent. Our cases were never easy, whether our clients were innocent or not.

I worked to recruit other lawyers and law students for the movement through the National Lawyers Guild, which experienced a great influx of young, progressive, and sometimes radical lawyers and legal workers in the late 1960s and 1970s. We started the Guild Anti–Police Brutality Project in Chicago in 1972, and Flint and I met Peter Schmiedel there. He joined our office the next year.

Later, we obtained our own Chicago police “red squad” (intelligence division) files, which showed the police had sent an undercover recruit (under the false name Kostro, ironically) into the Anti–Police Brutality Project. We had wondered what happened to “that Castro guy,” as he’d introduced himself. The files showed he had taken quite thorough notes and regularly reported on Flint’s and my activities there. I’ve never known whether the police were looking for an inside view of our Hampton strategy or just a clearer profile of us.

By 1974, I had a good bit of court experience, but it was mostly in criminal cases. Flint had less, having passed the bar two years earlier. We were already spending half our time on the Hampton civil case. Dennis and Michael were spending two-thirds of their time in Buffalo working with other lawyers defending the sixty indicted Attica Brothers.

This left Peter Schmiedel and Mara Siegel, who had recently joined the office, as our only other full-time Chicago lawyers. Peter Schmiedel, tall and handsome with premature salt- and-pepper hair, was just getting used to going to court. He had already taken some assignments researching and writing motions on the Hampton case under Flint’s tutelage. Mara continued to be the fire-eater she had been when Mzizi and I met her at Attica. Her style was flamboyant, and she was the first person I remember wearing a nose ring. Mara had a robust and sometimes crude sense of humor. She kept us men, whom she frequently referred to as “the boys,” on our toes by chiding us on our sexism. Mara liked going to court and was getting more confident and effective by the day. (She removed the nose ring after she passed the bar.) Pat Handlin, more conventional and sober than Mara, came to Chicago after graduating from SIU and became a legal worker in the office. At SIU she had been an antiwar student activist and a strong supporter of the Panther defendants in the Carbondale trial. She later started a prison project supporting women prisoners and jailhouse lawyers at Dwight Correctional Center.

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