#Black panther informant trial
#Black panther informant series

#Black panther informant trial

Muntaqim had two co-defendants at trial for the killings of the police officers in Harlem, when they each received sentences of 25 years to life. One of the seven, Delbert Africa, died in June just five months after he was set free. The surviving seven members of the Move 9, black liberation and environmental radicals from Philadelphia who were arrested following a police siege of their communal home in 1978, were all released on parole over the past two years. Others have been released on parole in recent months. Edward Poindexter, convicted of the killing of a police officer in Omaha, Nebraska, marked his 50 years in a prison cell in August. Muntaqim was one of a dwindling number of black liberation radicals who were incarcerated during the heyday of the Black Panthers and who have been locked up ever since. But more than anything else, we are angry.”

As far as the Black Panther Party was concerned, William O’Neal was one of their most loyal brothers in arms. In a statement she said: “We are heartbroken to see another of Joe’s killer set free by politics. As an FBI informant in the Black Panther Party, William O’Neal provided information that helped the Chicago police kill Fred Hampton in 1969. Muntaqim’s release has been virulently opposed by the New York police union, the PBA, and by the widow of one of the murdered police officers, Diane Piagentini. “Revolution for me is the evolutionary process of building a higher level of consciousness in society at large. “I now take the ‘r’ off the word and make it ‘evolutionary’,” he said. He said that in his many years behind bars he had matured from the revolutionary position that he adopted in 1971, though he remained committed to the cause of racial equality and justice. In the course of a three-hour filmed interview with the Guardian in Sullivan, Muntaqim described how he was only 18 years old when he signed up for the Panthers, quickly going on to join the armed and clandestine BLA. At the time of the Harlem incident he was a clandestine member of the underground wing of the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army.

#Black panther informant series

Muntaqim, 68, was the subject of a Guardian profile in 2018 as part of a series that looked at black liberation radicals incarcerated for decades in the wake of political and racial turbulence in the late 1960s and 70s. The two parole commissioners on the panel accepted his expression of remorse as genuine.

The officers had answered what they believed was a domestic dispute call but were then ambushed and shot. At a hearing earlier this month – at least his 10th such panel appearance since he became eligible for parole in 1998 – Muntaqim expressed his remorse for the killings of Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones.