65 pages • 2 hours read
Heather Ann ThompsonBlood in the Water
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 7: “Justice on Trial”
“Ernest Goodman” Summary
Thompson gives a brief biography of Detroit attorney Ernest Goodman. He was a man who throughout his legal career, which began in the 1930s, used the law to fight for social justice. In 1937 he formed the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the first racially integrated bar association. In 1974, on the verge of retirement, he was called to defend an Attica prisoner.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Mobilizing and Maneuvering”
After the indictments served by Simonetti, the prisoners now required a significant defense effort. This was organized at first through the Attica Defense Committee (ADC), which then, by September 1973, became the Attica Brothers Legal Defense (ABLD). It brought together lawyers and progressive legal aid and civil rights groups, with Don Jelinek as official director.
The first task of the ABLD was to raise funds. This was especially important given the four-and-a-half million dollars released for the prosecution and the fact that the group had been denied access to the three-quarters-of-a-million dollars allocated by the state for the defense. Thus, the ABLD engaged in fund raising via “leaflettings, pamphleteering, buying pamphlets, buttons, the holding of bake and cake sales” (316). Moreover, the ABLD succeeded in moving the location of the trial from Attica to Buffalo in Erie County, which was more racially diverse and had a major university. On the other hand, it failed in initial efforts to get any of the indictments dismissed.
Chapter 36 Summary: “A House Divided”
Chapter 36 discusses the tensions and divisions within the ABLD. These were between those who believed that the defense should be a more traditional legal one and those who wanted to broaden it out into a political case, “going on the offensive” and calling to account the state’s wrong-doing (322). Divisions also existed amongst the “Attica Brothers” themselves. This division was also reflected in a split between “Big Black” Smith, who formed the Attica Now Collective (ANC) and who wanted to take the struggle outside the courtroom, and Shango Bahati Kakawana, who wanted the best possible “traditional defense.”
Chapter 37 Summary: “Laying the Groundwork”
In chapter 57, Thompson looks at the preliminary work the ABLD needed to do for each trial, given that there might be a trial for each indictee. There had in fact been discussions of plea bargains being struck for various cases between prosecutor Simonetti and Jelinek. Such plea bargains would have meant certain cases not going to trial. Indeed, Jelinek suggested to Simonetti that offering dismissals and plea bargains could be exchanged for dropping all potential future indictments against state troopers. However, these negotiations broke down, and plea deals were left to the discretion of individuals.
Other groundwork included attempting to get a fairer jury composition. In fact, the ABLD won a court order compelling juries to be investigated for potentially discriminatory attitudes, and new jury pools were created because of this.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Testing the Waters”
Chapter 38 discusses the first three cases. The first, that of Richard Billelo, did not make it to trial, as he took a public plea to charges of kidnapping, coercion, and unlawful imprisonment in December of 1973. He did not work with the ABLD. The second case was that of William Smith, an African-American prisoner accused of raping a young White inmate. The choice of this case for the first trial was clearly political. However, the prosecution lost it on a technical error, as it had admitted the victim’s statement under “evidence” and as such it could not be used for the necessary corroboration required in rape cases.
Simonetti was confident that the third case, that of Vernon La Franque, accused of using a gas gun to subdue hostages, would be a success. Yet the state lost that case as well, the jury delivering a not-guilty verdict because state witnesses were unconvincing.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Going For Broke”
Thompson gives an account of the trials of John Hill and Charles Pernasalice, accused of murdering CO William Quinn. Simonetti was hopeful of getting a guilty verdict and therefore of justifying why the state had focused all its energies on prosecuting prisoners and ignored the actions of COs and troopers. The defense effort would be run by William Kunstler and the prosecution by Louis Aidala.
Despite the clear weaknesses in the state’s witnesses’ testimony, the jury delivered a guilty verdict, Hill for murder and Pernasalice for assault. They were sentenced to 20 years to life and three years, respectively. Thompson argues that the reason for these verdicts was that the case was fought on an emotional rather than a rational level, and it was felt by jurors that “someone needed to pay for William Quinn’s death” (361).
Chapter 40 Summary: “Evening the Score”
The next case to go to trial was that of Bernard Stroble, aka Shango Bahati Kakawana, for the murder of prisoner Barry Schwartz. The state had decided to accuse Shango because he was perceived to be one of the leaders of the rebellion. During preparations for the trial, a legal volunteer for the ABLD revealed that she was an informant for the FBI. Despite evidence that this situation compromised the defense’s efforts, the judge would not dismiss the trial.
Lawyer Ernie Goodman was able not only to discredit the testimony of the state’s witnesses but to show that Tommy Hicks had been the murderer. The state did not want Hicks to be the killer because he had already been killed in the retaking. Testimony from Edland, who had done the original autopsies, showing that the victim had not been killed on the day claimed by the state also helped the jury to deliver a “not guilty” for Shango.
Chapter 41 Summary: “A Long Journey Ahead”
The last case was that of Black Panther “Jomo,” born Cleveland McKinley Davis, standing trial for the murder of prisoner Kenneth Hess. His case encapsulated the tensions and contradictions of the ABLD legal strategy, between traditional and more political forms of defense. In the end he was able to take a plea bargain, admitting to charges of coercion provided the state dropped the murder charge. This leniency by Simonetti was motivated by the fact that Jomo insisted he knew who had shot him in the retaking. Attention was now being turned away from the prisoners to state wrongdoing due to a whistleblower who had emerged within the prosecution camp.
Part 7 Analysis
As Thompson notes, among the lawyers defending the Attica prisoners, “it was clear that there were serious tensions—generational, political, cultural and strategic” (321). Though there were nuances and complexities in these differences, they tended to coalesce around a single essential conflict between the liberal legal perspective and the radical one. The former position was represented by older lawyers like Schwartz and William Hellerstein, while the latter was represented by younger figures like Kunstler and Elizabeth Fink. Theirs was not just a difference in views about the tactics necessary for winning. It reflected a difference of opinion on the very question of what “winning” would mean in this context.
The liberal lawyers had relatively straightforward answers on both these issues. Reflecting a traditional notion about the role of lawyers, their primary task and goal was to see their client acquitted. Whether or not this had a broader impact on society or politics was secondary. Further, they would achieve their goal by traditional means. This meant presenting tight and specific legal arguments that jurors could accept regardless of their politics. Lawyers like Fink believed precisely the opposite. That is, they thought that “politics belonged in the courtroom” (322). It was not, then, merely that lawyers could and should fight for just causes with broader social impacts. It was that the law itself was inherently political and bound up with all this. Thus, it should be treated as such. The law, on this view, was not a hermetically sealed and independent domain of facts, arguments, and pieces of evidence. Rather, it was a front in, and expression of, broader conflicts and debates about values and power present in society overall.
Such a view also influenced the radicals’ attitude towards tactics. In the courtroom it was not sufficient to win a legal argument. At least it was not if you wished to get defendants like the Attica prisoners acquitted. It was also necessary to win larger arguments about morality and politics. In this case it meant taking on the issue of what the state had done and the agenda behind it, rather than just proving what prisoners had not done. Indeed, there were some who went even further. They, like “Big Black” Smith, believed that because a traditional trial would always favor the interests of the powerful, “the system needed outside pressure to respond to injustice meaningfully” (323). In other words, street activism was required. Protests, marches, and speeches around the country, and outside the courthouse itself, would help mobilize public opinion to help win the debate inside the courtroom.
Unsurprisingly, the likes of Schwartz and Don Jelinek were unimpressed. Such tactics, in their view, were not only risky but “might end up alienating the very jurors the Brothers would be relying on for acquittals” (322). That is, ordinary juror members might feel like they were being pressured to side with a political cause rather than making a specific decision about a case. Either way, the ABLD was successful in at least holding itself together. It allowed Kunstler to pursue the more radical defense with Hill, and Schwartz the more traditional one with Pernasalice, in their joint trial.
This debate also put the prisoners themselves in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they wanted to be acquitted and serve no further time. Many therefore sought the best conventional defense possible, as did Shango. On the other hand, they realized that they were part of a broader symbolic struggle for the rights of oppressed prisoners everywhere. In simple terms, this can be expressed as the conflict between solidarity and self-interest. Doubtless strong bonds were formed between those who had survived together through so much suffering. At the same time, these bonds were tested by the perceived celebrity lifestyle of the media-projected leaders of the rebellion, Clark and Champen, while others still languished. The perception was that some had been exploiting the trauma of all for individual fame and wealth. This perception was not helped by revelations that some of the bailed Brothers had stolen money from the ABLD to pay for drugs.
In the end, the trial results were mixed. Pernasalice and especially Hill lost out, while Shango and others went free. In the former cases, as Thompson observes, it is hard to know whether a more traditional legal strategy than Kunstler pursued would have made a difference. Perhaps jurors would have convicted Hill regardless. Ironically, though, it was the state’s appeal to politics, not legal technicalities, that won it the day. This fact highlighted the limits to finding justice within the legal system for both sides in the radical–liberal debate.
