Vol. 71/No. 39      October 22, 2007

The six had been in jail since January. They were arrested under the pretext of new evidence in the 1971 murder of a San Francisco cop in Ingleside.

Richard Brown, 66, of San Francisco; Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Florida; Hank Jones, 72, of Altadena, California; and Francisco Torres, 58, of New York, all declared their innocence at a September 24 press conference here. Ray Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; and Richard O’Neal, 58, of San Francisco, were also released on bail.

Two of those charged, Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim, are serving time on frame-up charges of killing two New York City cops. They are ineligible for bail.

At an August 22 court hearing, Judge Philip Moscone reduced the bails of the six from $3 million each to sums ranging from $200,000 to $660,000. Supporters of the case raised money to cover the new bails over the following month.

“We are going to keep fighting,” Taylor told a September 23 fundraiser of nearly 100. “It inspires me to see all the young people here today.” All six defendants spoke at the event, sponsored by the San Francisco Print Collective.

Taylor was one of three men tortured by New Orleans police for three days in l973. The cops used electric shocks, cattle prods, and threatened asphyxiation with plastic bags to try and extract confessions in the Ingleside case. A federal court in San Francisco threw out the case in 1975 after the torture was revealed. None of the torturers were ever brought to trial.

In 1999, the San Francisco cops reopened the investigation, claiming that new forensic science had led to new evidence. In 2005, four of the men refused to testify before the grand jury investigating the case and were briefly jailed.

During August court hearings, prosecutor David Druliner asked that the bail be raised for most defendants to $5 million. He argued that this case was the same as those where murders of Blacks and civil rights leaders in the South have been prosecuted long after the crime. Michael Burt, attorney for Ray Boudreaux, said that while institutional racism prevented earlier prosecution of white supremacists, the opposite was the case for the San Francisco Eight. He pointed out that the case was prosecuted, and with the FBI “dogging all these men with hundreds of agents.”

The next court hearing will be October 10. For more information see www.FreetheSF8.org.  
 
 
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