FORMER BLACK PANTHERS SPEAK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEW YORK ON NOVEMBER 30th

[XXPANTHAXX]

CHARGES BASED ON EVIDENCE OBTAINED THROUGH TORTURE

INTERNATIONAL CALL REGARDING THE CASE, SIGNED BY NOBEL LAUREATES AND
HUMAN RIGHTS LEADERS, TO BE RELEASED AT MORNING INTERFAITH CHURCH
CENTER PRESS CONFERENCE

LIKE IT IS HOST GIL NOBLE TO DELIVER KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT PUBLIC
EVENING EVENT AT SEIU1199 MARTIN LUTHER KING LABOR CENTER

November 27, 2007, New York – ENCOURAGED BY THE WORDS OF NOBEL PEACE
PRIZE RECIPIENT ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU, WIDELY RESPECTED WABC NEWS
LIKE IT IS HOST GIL NOBLE, AND SCORES OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS, former
Black Panther activists will speak for the first time in New York on
November 30, 2007 at 7:00pm at the SEIU1199 Martin Luther King
Center, 310 W. 43rd Street, about their arrest last January on
charges related to the 1971 death of a San Francisco police officer.
earlier that morning, at an 11:00am press conference at the
interfaith church center (475 riverside drive-first floor lounge),
World Council of Churches representative lois M. dauway will release
an international call signed by several nobel laureates and key human
rights organizations, calling for all charges in the case to be dropped.

The case was thrown out in 1973 when it was revealed that police
torture had extracted the so-called “confessions� underlying the
indictments. Now the case is back on although prosecutors have not
brought any new evidence. They are basing the reinstatement of
charges on the same coerced and flawed evidence rejected a generation
ago.

In 1973, New Orleans police joined by members of the San Francisco
Police Department employed torture over the course of several days to
obtain information from members of the Black Panther Party. Members
of the Panthers were stripped naked, beaten, covered in blankets
soaked with boiling water, and had electric probes placed on their
genitals and other parts of their bodies. A court ruled in 1974 that
both the San Francisco and New Orleans police officers had engaged in
torture to extract confessions. Judges in Los Angeles and San
Francisco dismissed charges against the men in 1975 and 1976 based on
that ruling. In 2005 a grand jury convened in San Francisco to reopen
the case, but several of the men subpoenaed felt they were being
wrongly compelled to testify and refused to give testimony. They were
held in civil contempt and jailed until the expiration of the grand
jury.

The activists, who now range in age from 56 to 72 years, will be
speaking at the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center in New York City
at an event commemorating their activism and calling for the charges
to be dropped. Gil Noble, veteran host of ABC-TV’s Like It Is, and
Jill-Soffiyah Elijah, attorney for the activists and Deputy Director
of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, will speak.
“The case against these men was built on torture,� Elijah stated, “—
the same torture that the US has recently engaged in at places like
Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. It’s the same torture about which
the Attorney General and the White House refuse to be honest—
including the use of water-boarding and other unconscionable acts.�

The International Call, which demands an end to all incidents of
torture within the U.S. criminal justice system, reflects a growing
concern amongst the global human rights community and church groups
on issues relating to U.S. domestic policies. Requesting an official
investigation into the U.S. practices which led to the widespread
repression of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, the Nobel laureates also call for the immediate release,
on humanitarian grounds, of the two defendants not out on bail—
political prisoners Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim, who have been
serving disproportionately long prison sentences. Dauway, a Senior
Executive of the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church and
a central committee member of the WCC, noted that “the time has come
to set free those who have been bound. This case requires all of us
to come together and take an active stand for justice for all U.S.
political prisoners.�

Soffiyah Elijah, who will also be speaking at the morning press
conference, added, “The use of evidence extracted through torture to
charge elderly activists is an attempt to criminalize dissent and
rewrite the history of social justice organizations like the Black
Panthers. No decent person should tolerate this nor stand by silently
and watch what’s being done.�