Posted on 12/07/2003 4:59:03 PM PST by commiewatch
who is sundiata acoli?
Sundiata Acoli, aka Clark Edward Squire, was born in Texas in 1937. While extremely talented - he began working for NASA as a computer programmer in the 1950s - he threw his life away to join a series of violent extremist groups. On May 2, 1973, police pulled over a car containing Acoli, Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard), and Zayd Malik Shakur, all members of the Black Liberation Army, a Black Panther Party splinter group already responsible for many crimes. As the three were simply being questioned, Acoli and Shakur pulled semi-automatic weapons and began firing at the troopers. State Trooper Werner Foerster was hit twice in the chest; State Trooper James Harper was wounded in the shoulder. According to one account of the crime, Assata Shakur then took the wounded Foerster's gun and fired it twice into his head, executing him; according to other accounts, either Acoli or Shakur fired the fatal shot. During the shoot-out, Zayd Malik Shakur was killed, and both Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli wounded - Shakur severely, Acoli less so. A massive, two-day manhunt was required to bring Acoli to justice.
Both Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were convicted on murder charges, plus a host of lesser felonies; both were sentenced to serve life plus thirty years in prison. With such lengthy sentences, both should die behind bars. However, Assata Shakur escaped from prison in 1979, when four of her Black Liberation Army comrades took a corrections officer hostage and freed her from a visiting area. After several years as a fugitive in America, she was smuggled to Cuba, where she lives in luxury to this day as a guest of the Communist dictatorship. And now, only thirty years later, Sundiata Acoli is up for parole. His supporters are organizing to free him - this time not by taking hostages, but with a slick public relations campaign. If Acoli is paroled, it will be every bit as much a miscarriage of justice as when Assata Shakur was freed. When it comes to the murder of a police officer, life must truly mean life.
what can we do?
Right now, supporters of Sundiata Acoli are organizing to present him in the most favorable light before the parole board, through a campaign of organized letter-writing. They hope the parole board members will foolishly believe the letters of support show the community is united behind Acoli, and wants him to go free. They hope the parole board members will be too busy to investigate the backgrounds and motivations of the people who write in support. They hope the parole board will buy the ludicrous claim that Acoli acted in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. By writing to the New Jersey Board of Parole, by taking the time to get the true facts out to the papers, and by standing to confirm that the community most certainly does not want this convicted cop-killer back out on the street with the rest of his comrades, you break the illusion Sundiata's supporters are trying to create. It may seem like common sense to you - a cop-killer belongs in jail for life; a terrorist who killed in the name of a communist ideal should never see the light of day. You may want to rest easy, expecting that no sane parole board would ever release a man like Acoli. But you can't be complacent; you can't afford to. Decent-minded people assumed a parole board would never release Kathy Boudin, a member of the May 19th Communist Organization who helped kill two police officers and a security guard in 1981. Now, because we assumed the parole board would do the right thing on their own, Boudin is out walking the streets.
We cannot afford to be complacent about domestic terrorists in the future. You must make your voices heard, and demand that Acoli and his ilk never be released. Here's how.
(Excerpt) Read more at stopsundiata.com ...
Have you made contact with the many homicide survivor's groups? NJ should have one, probably a chapter of POMC, at the least. They do parole protest. All the folks at these links help protest parole hearings regardless of which state they are in. Parole hearings need plenty of time to organize. Contact every state congresscritter. Forget the Federal ones they hide behind constitutional grounds. Contact your media, talk radio, police associations across the nation. You have to be prepared to do a full assault by every means possible.
I stood in front of stores, went from shop to shop. Put petitions out in small businesses. Got people from all across Tennessee to do the same.
Be sure to put one out in gun shops. Don't forget firehouses, local police stations, etc.
Our son's killer did the max because we mounted aggressive campaigns to protest his release. Unfortunately he maxed out his time and was released to prey on the public again on June 21, 2003 after serving 14.5 years of a 20 year plea bargain.
Parents of Murdered Children & Other Survivors of Homicide This is a National Org that helps homicide survivors
Citizens Against Homicide
PO Box 2115
San Anselmo, CA 94979
415-455-5944
fax 415-454-0298
Jane Alexander is the lady you want to speak with.
New Jersey State Parole Board
P.O. Box 862
Trenton, NJ 08625
More instructions are on the link
If anyone thinks NJ doesn't parole Cop Killers, read on:
We're all very excited at StopSundiata.com, since opposition to Acoli's parole has begun to trickle in - we'd like to thank every decent person who has made their opposition to this man's release known. Special honors go to NJLawman.com, an excellent website on all things law-enforcement-related in the Garden State. The webmaster has put up a wonderful special report which publicizes the efforts to stop Sundiata. As he says, "Write letters, make calls, and recruit others! Cop killers should never see the light of day." Truer words were never spoken.
Over at the Law Enforcement Forums of Officer.com, one dedicated police officer opposed to Acoli's parole reminded us all that two more Black Liberation Army terrorists, Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom, are coming up for parole in 2004 - Bell in February, Bottom in July. Both are jailed for the May 21st, 1971 cold-blooded killings of New York City Police Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones. These two shouldn't be leaving jail in anything but a pine box. So, after you've written your letter to the New Jersey Parole Board, you can continue to help: see here and here for details. While you're at it, you can go to this site and help get justice for murdered Jersey City police officer Domenick Infantes.
Meanwhile, some of the good people over at Free Republic have been busy helping publicize the fight against parole; one supporter sent out an inspiring letter to her mailing-list of like-minded activists. It read in part:
When criminals do NOT serve out their full sentences, you send the wrong message to them, you in fact tell them it is okay to commit murder, that we will reward you for your good behavior in prison. One third of all homicides are committed by individuals on parole/probation. In 1998, 15 people a day were murdered by a GOVERNMENT SUPERVISED CONVICTED FELON on probation or parole!
As we've already mentioned, Acoli's not a stupid man, and he's radically opposed to America and the American way of life. If he's released, he's going to hop right on the radical speaking tour and inspire young people to follow in his murderous footsteps.
Finally, our thanks to Logic Monkey, the first blogger we know of to link to StopSundiata.com. Everybody, keep up the good work!
Things are going well, thanks to everyone who's been coming to our site. The word is getting out, and letters are making their way to the New Jersey Parole Board. Both National Review Online's The Corner and New Jersey's State Troopers Fraternal Association have linked to us in the past two days; we're grateful for their help. Many thanks to those of you who have donated to help pay for the costs of the webhosting, to get the word out through faxes and mailings, and to ensure we can do more in the future, both against Acoli and against other politically-motivated cop-killers.
We're confident that the letters that have been written and sent to the parole board over the last few days will help spoil the campaign Sundiata Acoli's supporters are running - they're trying to persuade the parole board that the public actually wants that cop-killer back out on the streets, and it only takes a few letters exposing their campaign to destroy this illusion. However, we don't just want a few letters - we want a flurry of letters. We need a blizzard of publicity to bury Sundiata's snow-job.
If you've written your letter, and you're wondering what else you can do, why not help us reach more of the public, by helping us get on the radio? We want to get the campaign to Stop Sundiata out over the talk radio airwaves, and we're going to need your help to do it. We've already sent notices to several of New Jersey's radio personalities, letting them know about the campaign and offering to appear on their programs. Just in case our mail doesn't get through, would you be willing to send a notice of your own? If enough people take the time to write just a brief e-mail to the radio station, you'll let the station owners and hosts know the people of New Jersey want to hear about the campaign to Stop Sundiata. Here's a few local hosts we hope you'll get in touch with:
Jim Gearhart - New Jersey 101.5
Dennis & Judi - New Jersey 101.5
Don Imus - W-FAN
Don Williams - WOND
Here's some nationally syndicated hosts that can also be heard in the New Jersey area:
If each person who visited this site took the time to send a short e-mail to just one of these radio hosts, we're confident they'd take notice. Keep up the publicity; don't let cop-killers hide from justice!
Thanks for the Ping and the link to this article, I will pass this on to other LEO's, and do my part with a letter......
bttt
Word that Acoli is eligible for a parole hearing spotlights an old bitterness
Friday, January 30, 2004
BY JONATHAN SCHUPPE
Star-Ledger Staff
For 30 years, Sundiata Acoli has been known as the guy who didn't get away.
He has remained in prison for murdering a state trooper long after his Black Liberation Army partner, Joanne Chesimard, escaped and fled to Cuba, where she became the State Police's most wanted fugitive and an international symbol of militant black nationalism.
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Now Acoli wants his freedom, too. In coming weeks, the state Parole Board will consider his request for release. News that he is eligible for a hearing has exposed old bitterness between two warring factions of the civil rights era: black revolutionaries and law enforcement.
To police, Acoli, 67, is a cop-killing terrorist who has no place in post-9/11 society.
"You're talking about someone who's part of a group that is not the least bit reluctant to send mayhem into the population," said former State Police Superintendent Clinton Pagano. "If there's a shred of truth in their wanting social change, then it would logically follow he'd be out with someone else trying to do the same thing again."
To his supporters, Acoli is a political prisoner who deserves freedom after three decades behind bars.
"It's awful what happened to that trooper and what happened to his family as a result, but I think justice has been served," said Bonnie Kerness, a prisoner advocate for the American Friends Service Committee in Newark who speaks regularly with Acoli. "This is 30 years. He's an old man. It's enough."
The Parole Board's impending decision promises to be among its most contentious. Since the agency announced last month that Acoli is eligible for a hearing early this year, its Trenton offices have been flooded with letters from supporters and opponents around the world. Both sides of the campaign have Web sites, one called "Stop Sundiata" and another run by the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign.
The Parole Board case, which will begin with preliminary hearings in late February, will not simply hinge upon the facts of the 1973 shooting. At issue is whether Acoli will commit another crime if released. The Parole Board is required to consider a wide range of factors, from his prison behavior and support in the community to statements from police and his victim's family.
Acoli's case history begins on May 2, 1973, with trooper James Harper pulling over a white two-door Pontiac sedan for a defective taillight near a New Jersey Turnpike entrance ramp in East Brunswick. Acoli was driving. Chesimard was in the front passenger seat, and James Costan was sitting in the back.
All three were members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers Party that advocated armed revolution and the creation of a separate black state. All three had taken Muslim names: Acoli was born Clark Edward Squire, Chesimard became known as Assata Shakur, and Costan went by Zayd Malik Shakur.
Acoli, a former NASA engineer and civil rights activist, got out of the car and spoke briefly with Harper. Trooper Werner Foerster arrived for backup, and patted Acoli down while Harper began questioning Chesimard and Costan.
Foerster shouted that he'd found an automatic gun clip on Acoli. That's when authorities say Chesimard pulled out a gun and shot Harper in the left shoulder.
Harper retreated behind his troop car while Foerster and Acoli wrestled nearby, authorities said. Chesimard and Costan each got out of the car and began shooting. Harper returned fire, hitting them both. Unable to see Foerster on the other side of his car, Harper ran to a State Police station 175 yards away and called for help.
Acoli, Chesimard and Costan got back into their car and took off down the Turnpike, pulling to the shoulder eight miles south. That's when other officers arrested Chesimard and found Costan, 32, dead, with Foerster's service weapon under his body.
Back at the shooting scene, Foerster, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran with a wife and son, also lay dead with bullet wounds in his right arm, abdomen and head. The two shots to his head were delivered by his own gun, authorities said.
Supporters of Acoli and Chesimard argued that they were ambushed and shot with their hands in the air as part of law enforcement's targeting of black activists, including the FBI Cointelpro project to disrupt what the agency called "black nationalist hate groups."
Their separate trials drew white and black protesters to the Middlesex County Courthouse. Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. State law at the time allowed for the possibility of parole.
In the first few years of his sentence, Acoli tried to escape a few times, according to authorities: twice from state prison in Trenton, and once from a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where he had been transferred.
For the past decade, he has been in a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa. Prison officials there said he refused requests from The Star-Ledger for an interview.
Harper, who still lives in New Jersey, did not return messages seeking comment. Foerster's widow and son declined comment.
In 1993, Acoli sought parole and was denied. In its written decision, the Parole Board cited Acoli's admitted attraction to the revolutionary atmosphere of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, his description of himself as a prisoner of war, his contention that he killed Foerster in self-defense and his record of disciplinary charges.
Since then, Acoli has largely avoided trouble, recently earning a favorable progress report from a U.S. Bureau of Prisons case manager for his work ethic and educational pursuits. His lawyers say he has two daughters and two grandchildren willing to take him in.
"There is no legal reason to hold him in; he is rehabbed," said lawyer Florence Morgan. "We're not disputing this was a serious crime. But to continue to use that as a basis for denying parole would mean it would never be granted. It is not the purpose of the Parole Board to deny someone otherwise eligible for parole based on hysteria or extraneous pressure."
"I understand there are people who don't want him paroled, but there's no evidence to support a denial," added Fayemi Shakur, a 27-year-old Newark resident who coordinates the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign. "There's more evidence supporting his release."
State Police Sgt. Kevin Tormey, a terrorism investigator, said there's plenty of reason to keep Acoli in prison.
"The BLA had declared war on law enforcement," Tormey said. "They basically executed Foerster and took his life for their cause. He and trooper Harper didn't know they were at war when they stopped that car. Acoli has never expressed any remorse or admitted guilt."
I hope they caught that guy and sent him back to jail
Feb 8, 2004
A former Black Liberation Army member imprisoned for the 1973 murder of a state trooper told a parole official last week that he accepts blame for the crime but did not shoot the officer.
In his first account to authorities of the roadside gunbattle, Sundiata Acoli told a hearing officer that he was knocked unconscious while scuffling with Trooper Werner Foerster. When he awoke, he said, the shooting had ended, and he fled with his companions, fellow BLA members James Costan, who was mortally wounded, and Joanne Chesimard.
"I didn't actually shoot him (Foerster), but I take responsibility for it," Acoli, 67, told the State Parole Board official in a telephone interview Wednesday from the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa. But Acoli also claimed the trooper had tried to pistol-whip him and that he grappled with Foerster "so he couldn't shoot me."
According to authorities, Foerster was shot four times, twice in the head by his own service weapon, after an early morning traffic stop. Chesimard and a second trooper, James Harper, were wounded. Acoli, born Clark Edward Squire, was convicted in 1974 of first-degree murder for killing Foerster. Chesimard, who also goes by Assata Shakur, was convicted three years later but escaped from prison and fled to Cuba, where she remains the State Police's most wanted fugitive.
Thirty years later, Acoli's parole case has stirred up old animosity between law enforcement authorities and supporters of civil-rights-era black militants. The State Parole Board has been flooded with hundreds of letters from around the world. Two dueling Web sites argue for and against his freedom.
Acoli has never given a statement to police and never testified in court, and there is no record of statements he made in his unsuccessful bid for parole a decade ago. Authorities believe Wednesday's interview, a tape of which was provided to The Star-Ledger, marks the first time Acoli has given his version of the shooting.
"I regret it," Acoli told the hearing officer. He also said, "I won't commit another crime."
But he offered no explanation of who fired the fatal shots. "You don't remember anything as far as how Trooper Foerster ended up getting shot, I believe it was four times?" the officer asked him. "Uh, right," Acoli said.
"You don't recall what happened to Trooper Foerster?"
"No."
Yesterday, State Police Sgt. Kevin Tormey called Acoli's account "a fairy tale."
"What he's trying to do is make himself look good in front of the parole board and reduce his involvement in the crime," said Tormey, a terrorism investigator who's been tracking Chesimard for 15 years.
Florence Morgan, one of Acoli's lawyers, would not comment on the parole interview because she had not heard it. But she said what mattered was that Acoli had reformed himself and was no longer a threat.
"Sundiata Acoli has been in prison more than three decades. He's 67 years old, and he's fully rehabilitated. He's gotten positive reports from his prison caseworker. Denial of parole would be the equivalent of a death sentence," Morgan said.
According to authorities, Harper pulled over a white two-door Pontiac sedan for a defective taillight near a New Jersey Turnpike entrance ramp in East Brunswick on May 2, 1973. Acoli was driving, with Chesimard and Costan his passengers. All three were members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party that advocated armed revolution and the creation of a separate black state.
Foerster arrived as backup, and patted down Acoli while Harper questioned the others. Foerster found a gun clip on Acoli, shouted to Harper, and that's when authorities say Chesimard pulled out a gun and shot Harper.
In the ensuing gunfight, Harper shot Chesimard and Costan before running to a nearby State Police station for help.
Acoli, Chesimard and Costan got into their car and drove five miles south on the Turnpike, where Chesimard was arrested, and Costan was found dead, lying on top of Foerster's gun. Acoli fled into the woods, where he was caught more than 30 hours later.
In last week's interview, Acoli said that while frisking him, Foerster found his gun and ammunition clip.
"Then I guess he got mad, and he started trying to pistol-whip me. He started pistol-whipping me," Acoli said.
Acoli said he was knocked against the car and heard gunfire. He said he began wrestling with Foerster, who had his service weapon in one hand and Acoli's gun in the other. Acoli said Foerster fired once, but missed him.
"Both of us were just kind of facing each other, and I was holding both of his hands real tight," Acoli said. "We were mostly kind of just jostling around. . . . The main thing, I wanted to make sure I held his gun so he couldn't shoot me."
Then, Acoli said, Harper fired at him, grazing him in the head.
"It knocked me out. And when I came to, (Costan) was leaning against the car, and I took him and put him in the car, put Assata in the back seat and drove away."
After the interview, Acoli's hearing officer filled out a report that classified it as "unfavorable."
"Denies shooting of trooper," the officer wrote.
Next, the parole board will solicit comments from prosecutors, Harper and the family of Foerster. Acoli and his supporters will have a chance to respond. Then the case will go to a two-member panel that will travel to Allenwood to interview Acoli. Then the panel will decide whether he goes free.
A black and white case; Investigation
May 29, 1999
To some she is Joanne Chesimard, ruthless convicted cop killer. To others Assata Shakur, black martyr and political refugee. Whichever, the revival of interest in her story, 26 years on, is setting alight the race issue that dogs American politics
The sacking earlier this year of Colonel Carl Williams, the superintendent of New Jersey's beleaguered state police for making racist remarks, will have come as no surprise to America's minority groups. In 1996, a Superior Court judge found that state troopers carried out a policy of "selective enforcement", targeting blacks for investigation and arrest. A recent survey found that black motorists are five times more likely than whites to be stopped by police on the New Jersey turnpike for no apparent offence. With at least four official inquiries currently under way into "racial profiling" by police, including an investigation by the US Justice Department and a grand jury investigation into the shooting of four unarmed black youths whose van was pulled over on their way to a basketball game last April, Williams's comments linking ethnic minorities to drug trafficking have resulted in the gravest crisis to hit the state police in its 78-year history. The day after his dismissal by Gov-ernor Christine Whitman, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all motorists stopped solely on the basis of skin colour.
One name will almost certainly be absent from ACLU's eventual list of plaintiffs, though many civil rights campaigners believe it should be right up at the top. As long-forgotten skeletons come clattering out of police cupboards, one woman's run-in with police more than a quarter of a century ago is often cited as the earliest sign of something rotten in the state of New Jersey. If anyone had reason, especially recently, to fear Williams, and must now celebrate his axing, it is surely Joanne Chesimard.
To the United State authorities, police and FBI, the name Joanne Chesimard means only one thing: violent crime. The name is stamped on hundreds of yellowing police documents dating back 26 years, in connection with more than half a dozen crimes. On the thousands of smudged and faded "Wanted" posters in circulation since the early Seventies, the public are warned to consider Chesimard, a black militant revolutionary, armed and "extremely dangerous". On the FBI's bundles of files charting the activities of one of the country's allegedly most dangerous women, branded the "soul of the Black Liberation Army". Since seeking political exile in Cuba after escaping from prison in 1979, where she was serving a life sentence for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Chesimard, now 51, has remained one of America's most wanted criminals.
Twenty years on, a detective continues to work full-time on her case, and, until his dismissal, no one was more obsessed with putting her behind bars again than Colonel Carl Williams. A large, lugubrious man of 59, with 35 years in the force, his features hardened as he described to me "Chesimard's cold-blooded execution of Trooper Foerster", recalling every detail as if it were yesterday. It began as an apparent minor traffic offence. Just after midnight on May 2, 1973, James Harper, a trooper on patrol on the New Jersey Turnpike, stopped a white Pontiac with a broken rear light. Harper did not know, claims Williams, that the three young black people in the car were members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), including one of their supposed "leaders", Joanne Chesimard, wanted for a number of recent armed bank robberies. Harper had become suspicious when the driver, Clark Squire, produced a licence in someone else's name. Within seconds, in response to a radio call for back-up, Trooper Werner Foerster arrived.
What was a routine stop swiftly erupted into carnage. Trooper Foerster, searching the driver at the roadside, discovered a fully loaded automatic magazine clip. Harper ordered the front-seat passenger, Chesimard, and her back-seat companion, James Costan, to raise their hands. At which point Chesimard, say the police, grabbed a gun from her bag and shot Harper in the shoulder. Between 20 and 30 shots were fired in the ensuing gun battle, leaving Costan dying and Chesimard critically wounded. During the exchange of fire, Trooper Harper ran out of ammunition and fled to a nearby administration building for help. Moments later Squire drove off with Chesimard and Costan to a spot five miles away, where they were tracked down by police. Trooper Foerster was later found dead beside his car, shot twice in the head with his own revolver. "The weapon was ripped from his holster. He was already wounded. They could have driven off. But first they executed him in cold blood," said Williams.
Although the prosecution could not prove she fired the fatal shots, under New Jersey law being an accomplice to murder carries the same life sentence. In 1974 Clark Squire, aka Sundiata Acoli, was imprisoned for life for the murders of Trooper Foerster and his own comrade, James Costan, aka Zayd Shakur. Chesimard's trial was postponed because she had become pregnant by Fred W X Hilton, a co-defendant, while they shared a court cell during their earlier trial for an armed robbery in the Bronx, of which they were acquitted. She gave birth to her daughter, Kakuya, in prison on Rikers Island the following year.
Later, after a widely covered nine-week trial in 1977, Chesimard, then 30, was given a life term for her part in Trooper Foerster's murder, and an additional 26 years for assault and on weapons charges. To the hundreds of civil rights campaigners who had demonstrated outside the court each day, this was nothing less than a travesty of justice. Professor Lennox Hinds, director of the Conference of Black Lawyers denounced the trial as "a legalised lynching" carried out by a "kangaroo court".
On admission to hospital, Chesimard claimed she was terrorised and tortured by police. Despite severe injuries, she remained shackled by both ankles to a bed, guarded round the clock by troopers with pointed shotguns ready to shoot, even during visits by her attorney, Evelyn Williams. Williams was forced to strip naked and undergo a body search before each visit, until obtaining a court order prohibiting further humiliation. Most of Chesimard's four years in custody awaiting trial were spent at a high-security men's prison, in solitary confinement in a filthy, infested cell under 24-hour surveillance, deprived of natural light, adequate nutrition, exercise or ventilation. In 1979, a special UN investigation into human rights abuses of political prisoners cited her case as one of the worst examples of such violations.
What has always disturbed many lawyers and Chesimard's supporters about the murder trial is that the testimony of trooper James Harper, the only police witness to events at the scene, appeared deeply flawed. During his testimony, Harper admitted he had lied to the grand jury and in his official reports about seeing her fire: in fact, he admitted he never saw her draw a gun, and no gunshot residue was found on her fingers. Chesimard has always insisted that Harper fired first when she had her arms up, then shot her again from the back, paralysing her right arm. Medical evidence appears to substantiate her story. Dr Arthur Turner Davidson, Associate Professor of Surgery at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, testified that the wounds in Chesimard's upper arms, armpit and chest, and the severed median nerve that instantly paralysed her right arm, could only have been caused if both arms were raised. To sustain such injuries while crouching and firing a pistol he said "would be anatomically impossible". Dr David Spain, a pathologist from Brookdale College, confirmed that the trajectory of the bullets which entered her chest and shattered her collarbone was inconsistent with somebody whose arm was positioned to fire a gun.
Although the prosecution produced no medical evidence to refute that testimony, according to Col Williams, the police have ample proof that she initiated the gun battle. "She fired first, and went on shooting from inside and outside the vehicle. Her blood was all over the side of the car. Bullets from her gun were taken from the bodies of both troopers, and from inside the car. In her purse were three loaded magazine clips. She was armed. She's just a liar who wants to appear a victim." He dismissed claims that the police were trailing the car or that Chesimard was treated brutally. "Look, don't bring up the race issue," he snapped at me tersely, "they weren't stopped for anything other than a motor vehicle violation. Would we send one trooper out on a stop like that knowing three dangerous fugitives were in the car? We'd send an army."
However, another disturbing finding, by Evelyn Williams, was the existence of tape recordings and police reports made several hours after the shoot-out, which reveal that when Harper fled to the adminstration building, only 200 yards away, at no stage did he report Foerster's presence at the scene. The first anyone at headquarters knew of Foerster's involvement was when his body was discovered beside his patrol car, more than an hour later.
Any suggestion of a miscarriage of justice is met with equal hostility by state authorities. At Trenton's Justice Complex, Peter Verniero, New Jersey's Attorney General, insists that Chesimard's freedom represents a continued affront to the community. News that she had been granted asylum by Cuba in 1984 was a slap in the face to the authorities: not only is it a humiliating reminder of a spectacular shortfall in prison security, whereby her four armed accomplices were permitted entry without being searched; her success in avoiding recapture for four years before fleeing to Cuba has also done little for police morale.
Following news of Williams's sacking two months ago, Verniero, recently nominated to the state Supreme Court, admitted that the unprovoked shooting of four unarmed black youths by police on the turnpike last year prompted him to launch an inquiry into police racist practices. Yet he denies the possibility that Chesimard may have been a victim of injustice. "It is we who have suffered an injustice by knowing someone convicted of a heinous crime enjoys a safe haven to which she is not entitled," he says. "The criminal justice system of the US speaks for itself: in terms of due process, balance of rights, she was accorded every constitutional right. That is beyond debate."
But is it? Given the flimsy and conflicting evidence on which she was convicted, there have long been suggestions by her supporters of a cover-up or of a plot to ambush Chesimard because of her supposed terrorist activities since 1969, after joining the Black Panthers. The claim that is certainly least credible is that she had a fair trial. By the time she was tried for murder, there had been 289 articles in the local press portraying Chesimard as a dangerous terrorist W X and mentioning her alleged involvement in violent crimes - none of which led to conviction - as well as the turnpike shooting. A poll of residents in the overwhelmingly white population of Middlesex County found that 83 per cent knew who she was and 70 per cent said she was guilty based on pre-trial publicity. Her attorneys were denied the right to question prospective jurors. The trial judge cut off defence funds for crucial expert testimony and would not allow the introduction of evidence related to the FBI's infamous counter-intelligence programme (COINTELPRO), designed, in J.Edgar Hoover's words, to "expose, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralise" Black activist groups. Under the campaign, initiated in 1967, Chesimard's reputation as an alleged BLA leader made her a "shoot-to-kill" target. Yet she was tried by an all-white jury, including friends and relatives of New Jersey police.
Since the final drama of her prison escape, Joanne Chesimard had ceased making news. As a political refugee in a country that has had no diplomatic relations with the USA for the past 40 years, her anonymity seemed guaranteed. Her espousal of Castro's Marxist principles, chiming nicely with her own Black Power ideology, made her a welcome guest. The absence of an extradition treaty ensured her safety. So it might have remained, had not recent events propelled Chesimard into the spotlight again, threatening her freedom.
In December 1997, Williams hit on a plan of almost shattering naivety: weeks before Pope John Paul's visit to Cuba, Williams dispatched a letter to the Vatican asking his Holiness to persuade Fidel Castro to deport Chesimard. Not surprisingly, Col Williams declined to reveal details of the Vatican's response.
In Havana, Joanne Chesimard, taking her cue from Williams, took advantage of the Pope's arrival to give him her side of the story. In her letter, broadcast on the Internet, she said, "I saw (escape) as a necessary step, not only because I was innocent of the charges against me, but because I knew that in the racist legal system in the United States I would receive no justice. I was also afraid I would be murdered in prison." The same week, an NBC TV reporter covering the Pope's visit tracked her down and talked her into giving an exclusive interview. It was an unwise move. The edited interview was TV at its crudest, most sensational and superficial. As calculated, it hit a nerve. Widely publicised and broadcast on several nights, footage of "the convicted cop-killer" enjoying a relaxed, carefree life as a writer and academic was intercut with clips of the trooper's tearful, still grief-stricken widow on the 25th anniversary of his death.
Realising she had been stitched up, in another open letter on the Internet, which begins with the melodramatic statement "I am a 20th-century escaped slave", Chesimard set out to refute every charge made against her in the programme, claiming that she only agreed to the interview because she regarded Williams's letter to the Vatican "as a vicious, vulgar publicity manoeuvre... a cynical attempt to manipulate Pope John Paul". But the damage was done; the New Jersey authorities lost no time in baying for Chesimard's blood. State Governor Christine Whitman dispatched official letters to the Attorney General, Janet Reno, and Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, denouncing her lack of remorse, her allegations of racism and injustice as "an intolerable affront". In a letter to President Clinton, Governor Whitman said that "the Cuban government has allowed this convicted murderer to remain under its protection for too long", and demanded that the President immediately "put pressure on Castro to return Chesimard to the United States".
Whitman announced a $50,000 reward for Chesimard's recapture, soon doubling it to $100,000, which critics denounced as tantamount to soliciting kidnap or murder. Broadcasting to native Cubans via a Florida-based radio station, the governor appealed for cooperation, pointedly commenting on the Chesi-mard's privileged lifestyle compared with the poverty-stricken existence of most Cuban citizens.
During our interview, Whitman refused to be drawn into discussion on Chesimard's claims of innocence. "She is not a political refugee, she's a cop killer, New Jersey's most-wanted criminal. There's no nice way to put it. It was a particularly brutal type of murder, and it is deeply frustrating to know she is able to live as a VIP while we can do nothing about it." But what about the absence of an extradition treaty? "It is amazing how people can get around that. There are diplomatic avenues that transcend the rules of extradition. There are, after all, many things that Fidel Castro wants from the USA, and these come at a price," she responds brusquely. "President Clinton and Janet Reno have been highly receptive to our request. If the administration wishes to go forward with any normalisation of relations with Cuba, they will first have to take the return of Chesimard into consideration." Like Williams and Verniero, Whitman rejects any suggestion that Chesimard could have been the victim of racism. "This has nothing to do with race... everything to do with crime."
Much of Governor Whitman's muscle-flexing could be interpreted as a politically motivated exercise. A Repub-lican with recognised political ambitions, she not only wants to appear tough on crime, but relies on the support of New Jersey's right-wing Cuban expatriate population - the largest outside Florida. On the Internet, Chesimard claims that: "She (Whitman), like Senator Robert Torricelli and several other opportunistic politicians, came to power as part-time lobbyists for the Batista faction - so they want to use my case as a barrier to normalising relations with Cuba, and as a pretext for maintaining the immoral blockade against the Cuban people." As media circuses go, this is still a blip. However, the issue is gaining momentum, threatening to lead to serious racial upheaval in the US. Last September's unanimous vote by the House of Representatives in favour of Resolution 254 held little interest to the international press. That resolution called on the Government of Cuba to extradite Joanne Chesimard. It was a victory for the law and order lobby. But for many left-wing activists it represents both a violation of human rights and international law. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights: "That resolution was not only incredibly hypocritical, given the number of Cuban and other terrorists made welcome by the US, but also illegal and unwarranted." To the African-American community, the most shocking fact is that voters in Congress included many prominent black and liberal politicians who claimed later not to have known the true identity of Joanne Chesimard. That, says Safyia Bukhari, director of a pressure group campaigning for amnesty for political prisoners, is "a totally unbelievable bunch of crock".
To her friends and fellow activists, Joanne Chesimard is a name that has been long used almost exclusively by her enemies. A former Panther, Safyia claims that the resolution, sponsored by New Jersey Congressman Bob Franks, identified her by that name purposely to hoodwink politicians who support the cause of Assata Shakur - as she is known in the African-American community. This was the African name Chesimard adopted as a New York college student in the Sixties when joining the Panthers, to replace what she calls her "slave name".
Nearly 30 years after throwing herself into local community activism and joining the Panthers, inspired by the rhetoric of Malcolm X, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, Assata Shakur has become a hero of Black revolutionary struggle. According to Manhattan lawyer Ron Cuby, a partner of the late William Kunstler who led Assata's defence team at her murder trial in 1977, she is a Seventies cult figure who has become a powerful symbol of inspiration to a new generation of activists. "There are a number of martyrs in the African-American community, and she is certainly one of them. What makes her different from others, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, is that she is alive and can speak out."
The question is, for how long will she be free to do so?
Already, since re-emerging into the public eye, and especially after the vote by Congress, she has lain low, declining interviews and making no further public statements on the advice of her lawyers. "Her presence poses a number of problems both to the US and Cuba," says Cuby. "Had she emigrated to South Africa she would have had the support of Nelson Mandela. Having the support of Fidel, as a convicted criminal claiming to have been a political prisoner, isn't the same. Americais not going to change its relations with Cuba as long as the issue over Assata remains unresolved. And it's debatable whether it can be resolved."
After initial hesitation, writer and radio producer-broadcaster Rosemari Mealy, an activist and former Panther, invited me to her home in Harlem. Sunlight streamed through a forest of indoor plants on to a life-size photograph of Assata, elegant and serene in a brightly patterned African dress and head-wrap. Mealy, like many of Assata's intimates, suspects the New Jersey shooting may well have been an ambush. "The police seemed to be tailing her," she said. "It could have happened to any Panther woman or BLA sister".
She has her own account of being under FBI surveillance. "After Assata's arrest, they found my name in her address book, though I didn't know her then, and assumed wrongly that I was a BLA member and a contact for a safe house where Assata might be hiding after her escape."
For seven years Mealy found she was being followed in the street, had her phone bugged and home kept under surveillance. She was falsely charged with using forged credit cards while rumours were circulated about her alleged adultery and attempts were made to remove her son. As a child-development specialist she had worked with Dr Benjamin Spock. Suddenly she was refused other jobs. "I never knew the reason for any of this until I saw my FBI files - years later."
As a regular visitor to Assata's home in Havana, Mealy believes what infuriates the authorities most is that Assata has a platform from which to speak out against human rights abuses in the US. "She is the best ambassador we have, with access to the many international delegations now visiting Cuba. Her speeches and interviews are carried on the Net, broadcast here on radio or video, and in the local press. She is becoming a name among people who once never would have heard of her."
Safyia Bukhari, who has known Assata's since 1970, also blames the "witch-hunt for black revolutionaries", which led to her own false conviction for armed robbery and attempted murder and a 20-year sentence in 1975. She sees the recent Congress vote as a betrayal by liberal politicans, especially those of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Jesse Jackson, former Black Panther Bobby Rush, socialist Congressman John Conyers, and Chair of the Caucus Maxine Waters, the most vociferous compaigner against racism. "To claim they voted yes 'inadvertently', not recognising that Joanne Chesimard was Assata Shakur, is such crap. But we blame ourselves, as campaigners, for not warning the congressmen early and forcefully enough about what was going on: we knew since last March they were trying to put this resolution through."
Although the Cuban Foreign Ministry has refused all requests to deport Assata, if the Senate passes a resolution to bring pressure to bear on Castro's government, according to former Panther, journalist Playthel Benjamin, the situation poses a serious dilemma for black politicians who privately oppose her deportation but will not risk alienating voters by supporting a terrorist. "Even the most liberal politician won't take a stand if it means losing their seat," says Benjamin.
Like many, he sees Assata's future as uncertain, fearing for her safety, and that of her daughter, a student at an American university, whose own two-year-old child Assata has never seen.
Only one thing remains clear: controversy over what happened that night in New Jersey a quarter of a century ago can only continue. And with race and politcs so intertwined, the likelihood of discovering the truth seems evermore remote.
Chesimard partner in trooper's murder wants freedom; Word that Acoli is eligible for a parole hearing spotlights an old bitterness.
Jan 30, 2004
For 30 years, Sundiata Acoli has been known as the guy who didn't get away.
He has remained in prison for murdering a state trooper long after his Black Liberation Army partner, Joanne Chesimard, escaped and fled to Cuba, where she became the State Police's most wanted fugitive and an international symbol of militant black nationalism.
Now Acoli wants his freedom, too. In coming weeks, the state Parole Board will consider his request for release. News that he is eligible for a hearing has exposed old bitterness between two warring factions of the civil rights era: black revolutionaries and law enforcement. To police, Acoli, 67, who was born Clark Edward Squire, is a cop-killing terrorist who has no place in post-9/11 society.
"You're talking about someone who's part of a group that is not the least bit reluctant to send mayhem into the population," said former State Police Superintendent Clinton Pagano. "If there's a shred of truth in their wanting social change, then it would logically follow he'd be out with someone else trying to do the same thing again."
To his supporters, Acoli is a political prisoner who deserves freedom after three decades behind bars.
"It's awful what happened to that trooper and what happened to his family as a result, but I think justice has been served," said Bonnie Kerness, a prisoner advocate for the American Friends Service Committee in Newark who speaks regularly with Acoli. "This is 30 years. He's an old man. It's enough."
The Parole Board's impending decision promises to be among its most contentious. Since the agency announced last month that Acoli is eligible for a hearing early this year, its Trenton offices have been flooded with letters from supporters and opponents around the world.
Both sides of the campaign have Web sites, one called "Stop Sundiata" and another run by the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign.
The Parole Board case, which will begin with preliminary hearings in late February, will not simply hinge upon the facts of the 1973 shooting. At issue is whether Acoli will commit another crime if released. The Parole Board is required to consider a wide range of factors, from his prison behavior and support in the community to statements from police and his victim's family.
Acoli's case history begins on May 2, 1973, with trooper James Harper pulling over a white two-door Pontiac sedan for a defective taillight near a New Jersey Turnpike entrance ramp in East Brunswick. Acoli was driving. Chesimard was in the front passenger seat, and James Costan was sitting in the back.
All three were members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party that advocated armed revolution and the creation of a separate black state. All three had taken Muslim names. Chesimard became known as Assata Shakur, and Costan went by Zayd Malik Shakur.
Acoli, a former NASA engineer and civil rights activist, got out of the car and spoke briefly with Harper. Trooper Werner Foerster arrived for backup, and patted Acoli down while Harper began questioning Chesimard and Costan.
Foerster shouted that he'd found an automatic gun clip on Acoli. That's when authorities say Chesimard pulled out a gun and shot Harper in the left shoulder.
Harper retreated behind his troop car while Foerster and Acoli wrestled nearby, authorities said. Chesimard and Costan each got out of the car and began shooting. Harper returned fire, hitting them both.
Unable to see Foerster on the other side of his car, Harper ran to a State Police station 175 yards away and called for help.
Acoli, Chesimard and Costan got back into their car and took off down the Turnpike, pulling to the shoulder eight miles south. That's when other officers arrested Chesimard and found Costan, 32, dead, with Foerster's service weapon under his body.
Back at the shooting scene, Foerster, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran with a wife and son, also lay dead with bullet wounds in his right arm, abdomen and head. The two shots to his head were delivered by his own gun, authorities said.
Supporters of Acoli and Chesimard argued that they were ambushed and shot with their hands in the air as part of law enforcement's targeting of black activists, including the FBI Cointelpro project to disrupt what the agency called "black nationalist hate groups."
Their separate trials drew white and black protesters to the Middlesex County Courthouse. Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
State law at the time allowed for the possibility of parole.
In the first few years of his sentence, Acoli tried to escape a few times, according to authorities: twice from state prison in Trenton, and once from a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where he had been transferred.
For the past decade, he has been in a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa. Prison officials there said he refused requests from The Star-Ledger for an interview.
Harper, who still lives in New Jersey, did not return messages seeking comment.
Foerster's widow and son declined comment.
In 1993, Acoli sought parole and was denied.
In its written decision, the Parole Board cited Acoli's admitted attraction to the revolutionary atmosphere of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, his description of himself as a prisoner of war, his contention that he killed Foerster in self-defense and his record of disciplinary charges.
Since then, Acoli has largely avoided trouble, recently earning a favorable progress report from a U.S. Bureau of Prisons case manager for his work ethic and educational pursuits.
His lawyers say he has two daughters and two grandchildren willing to take him in.
"There is no legal reason to hold him in. He is rehabbed," said lawyer Florence Morgan. "We're not disputing this was a serious crime. But to continue to use that as a basis for denying parole would mean it would never be granted.
"It is not the purpose of the Parole Board to deny someone otherwise eligible for parole based on hysteria or extraneous pressure."
"I understand there are people who don't want him paroled, but there's no evidence to support a denial," added Fayemi Shakur, a 27-year-old Newark resident who coordinates the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign. "There's more evidence supporting his release."
State Police Sgt. Kevin Tormey, a terrorism investigator, said there's plenty of reason to keep Acoli in prison.
"The BLA had declared war on law enforcement," Tormey said. "They basically executed Foerster and took his life for their cause.
"He and trooper Harper didn't know they were at war when they stopped that car. Acoli has never expressed any remorse or admitted guilt."
Board delays decision on paroling trooper killer
June 30, 2004
The state Parole Board yesterday put off its decision on whether to free convicted cop-killer Sundiata Acoli, who has been in prison for three decades for taking part in the murder of state Trooper Werner Foerster.
Acoli was one of three Black Liberation Army members, including Joanne Chesimard, involved in the fatal shootout.
Parole Board members Norman Robertson and Dominic Porrovecchio traveled to the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa., where Acoli is held and interviewed him privately for about five hours yesterday.
Before deciding whether to grant parole, however, Robertson and Porrovecchio said they wanted to examine transcripts of the interview, said Parole Board spokesman Ed Bray. They are expected to announce a decision in about a week.
Prisoners eligible for parole have their cases considered by a panel of two board members. When considering the case of a murderer, any approval of parole by the panel must then be certified by a vote of the entire 14- member board. If the panel denies parole, the inmate can appeal that decision.
In prior interviews with parole officials, Acoli, born Clark Edward Squire, has accepted blame for the murder but insisted he did not shoot Foerster.
According to authorities, Foerster was shot four times, twice in the head by his own service weapon, after a traffic stop on May 2, 1973. A second trooper, James Harper, was wounded. Chesimard, who also goes by the name Assata Shakur, and a third BLA member, James Costan, were shot, Costan fatally.
Chesimard escaped from state prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba, becoming the State Police's most wanted fugitive.
Law enforcement officials have argued against Acoli's release, saying he is an unrepentant liar. Acoli supporters say he has reformed himself and is no longer a public safety threat. The three-decades-old murder also remains an open wound for troopers because Chesimard has remained a fugitive.
A former Black Liberation Army member imprisoned for the 1973 murder of a state trooper told a parole official last week that he accepts blame for the crime but did not shoot the officer.
In his first account to authorities of the roadside gunbattle, Sundiata Acoli told a hearing officer that he was knocked unconscious while scuffling with Trooper Werner Foerster. When he awoke, he said, the shooting had ended, and he fled with his companions, fellow BLA members James Costan, who was mortally wounded, and Joanne Chesimard.
"I didn't actually shoot him (Foerster), but I take responsibility for it," Acoli, 67, told the State Parole Board official in a telephone interview Wednesday from the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa. But Acoli also claimed the trooper had tried to pistol-whip him and that he grappled with Foerster "so he couldn't shoot me."
According to authorities, Foerster was shot four times, twice in the head by his own service weapon, after an early morning traffic stop. Chesimard and a second trooper, James Harper, were wounded. Acoli, born Clark Edward Squire, was convicted in 1974 of first-degree murder for killing Foerster. Chesimard, who also goes by Assata Shakur, was convicted three years later but escaped from prison and fled to Cuba, where she remains the State Police's most wanted fugitive.
Thirty years later, Acoli's parole case has stirred up old animosity between law enforcement authorities and supporters of civil-rights-era black militants. The State Parole Board has been flooded with hundreds of letters from around the world. Two dueling Web sites argue for and against his freedom.
Acoli has never given a statement to police and never testified in court, and there is no record of statements he made in his unsuccessful bid for parole a decade ago. Authorities believe Wednesday's interview, a tape of which was provided to The Star-Ledger, marks the first time Acoli has given his version of the shooting.
"I regret it," Acoli told the hearing officer. He also said, "I won't commit another crime."
But he offered no explanation of who fired the fatal shots. "You don't remember anything as far as how Trooper Foerster ended up getting shot, I believe it was four times?" the officer asked him. "Uh, right," Acoli said.
"You don't recall what happened to Trooper Foerster?"
"No."
Yesterday, State Police Sgt. Kevin Tormey called Acoli's account "a fairy tale."
"What he's trying to do is make himself look good in front of the parole board and reduce his involvement in the crime," said Tormey, a terrorism investigator who's been tracking Chesimard for 15 years.
Florence Morgan, one of Acoli's lawyers, would not comment on the parole interview because she had not heard it. But she said what mattered was that Acoli had reformed himself and was no longer a threat.
"Sundiata Acoli has been in prison more than three decades. He's 67 years old, and he's fully rehabilitated. He's gotten positive reports from his prison caseworker. Denial of parole would be the equivalent of a death sentence," Morgan said.
According to authorities, Harper pulled over a white two-door Pontiac sedan for a defective taillight near a New Jersey Turnpike entrance ramp in East Brunswick on May 2, 1973. Acoli was driving, with Chesimard and Costan his passengers. All three were members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party that advocated armed revolution and the creation of a separate black state.
Foerster arrived as backup, and patted down Acoli while Harper questioned the others. Foerster found a gun clip on Acoli, shouted to Harper, and that's when authorities say Chesimard pulled out a gun and shot Harper.
In the ensuing gunfight, Harper shot Chesimard and Costan before running to a nearby State Police station for help.
Acoli, Chesimard and Costan got into their car and drove five miles south on the Turnpike, where Chesimard was arrested, and Costan was found dead, lying on top of Foerster's gun. Acoli fled into the woods, where he was caught more than 30 hours later.
In last week's interview, Acoli said that while frisking him, Foerster found his gun and ammunition clip.
"Then I guess he got mad, and he started trying to pistol-whip me. He started pistol-whipping me," Acoli said.
Acoli said he was knocked against the car and heard gunfire. He said he began wrestling with Foerster, who had his service weapon in one hand and Acoli's gun in the other. Acoli said Foerster fired once, but missed him.
"Both of us were just kind of facing each other, and I was holding both of his hands real tight," Acoli said. "We were mostly kind of just jostling around. . . . The main thing, I wanted to make sure I held his gun so he couldn't shoot me."
Then, Acoli said, Harper fired at him, grazing him in the head.
"It knocked me out. And when I came to, (Costan) was leaning against the car, and I took him and put him in the car, put Assata in the back seat and drove away."
After the interview, Acoli's hearing officer filled out a report that classified it as "unfavorable."
"Denies shooting of trooper," the officer wrote.
Next, the parole board will solicit comments from prosecutors, Harper and the family of Foerster. Acoli and his supporters will have a chance to respond. Then the case will go to a two-member panel that will travel to Allenwood to interview Acoli. Then the panel will decide whether he goes free.
Chesimard partner in trooper's murder wants freedom; Word that Acoli is eligible for a parole hearing spotlights an old bitterness
For 30 years, Sundiata Acoli has been known as the guy who didn't get away.
He has remained in prison for murdering a state trooper long after his Black Liberation Army partner, Joanne Chesimard, escaped and fled to Cuba, where she became the State Police's most wanted fugitive and an international symbol of militant black nationalism.
Now Acoli wants his freedom, too. In coming weeks, the state Parole Board will consider his request for release. News that he is eligible for a hearing has exposed old bitterness between two warring factions of the civil rights era: black revolutionaries and law enforcement. To police, Acoli, 67, who was born Clark Edward Squire, is a cop-killing terrorist who has no place in post-9/11 society.
"You're talking about someone who's part of a group that is not the least bit reluctant to send mayhem into the population," said former State Police Superintendent Clinton Pagano. "If there's a shred of truth in their wanting social change, then it would logically follow he'd be out with someone else trying to do the same thing again."
To his supporters, Acoli is a political prisoner who deserves freedom after three decades behind bars.
"It's awful what happened to that trooper and what happened to his family as a result, but I think justice has been served," said Bonnie Kerness, a prisoner advocate for the American Friends Service Committee in Newark who speaks regularly with Acoli. "This is 30 years. He's an old man. It's enough."
The Parole Board's impending decision promises to be among its most contentious. Since the agency announced last month that Acoli is eligible for a hearing early this year, its Trenton offices have been flooded with letters from supporters and opponents around the world.
Both sides of the campaign have Web sites, one called "Stop Sundiata" and another run by the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign.
The Parole Board case, which will begin with preliminary hearings in late February, will not simply hinge upon the facts of the 1973 shooting. At issue is whether Acoli will commit another crime if released. The Parole Board is required to consider a wide range of factors, from his prison behavior and support in the community to statements from police and his victim's family.
Acoli's case history begins on May 2, 1973, with trooper James Harper pulling over a white two-door Pontiac sedan for a defective taillight near a New Jersey Turnpike entrance ramp in East Brunswick. Acoli was driving. Chesimard was in the front passenger seat, and James Costan was sitting in the back.
All three were members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party that advocated armed revolution and the creation of a separate black state. All three had taken Muslim names. Chesimard became known as Assata Shakur, and Costan went by Zayd Malik Shakur.
Acoli, a former NASA engineer and civil rights activist, got out of the car and spoke briefly with Harper. Trooper Werner Foerster arrived for backup, and patted Acoli down while Harper began questioning Chesimard and Costan.
Foerster shouted that he'd found an automatic gun clip on Acoli. That's when authorities say Chesimard pulled out a gun and shot Harper in the left shoulder.
Harper retreated behind his troop car while Foerster and Acoli wrestled nearby, authorities said. Chesimard and Costan each got out of the car and began shooting. Harper returned fire, hitting them both.
Unable to see Foerster on the other side of his car, Harper ran to a State Police station 175 yards away and called for help.
Acoli, Chesimard and Costan got back into their car and took off down the Turnpike, pulling to the shoulder eight miles south. That's when other officers arrested Chesimard and found Costan, 32, dead, with Foerster's service weapon under his body.
Back at the shooting scene, Foerster, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran with a wife and son, also lay dead with bullet wounds in his right arm, abdomen and head. The two shots to his head were delivered by his own gun, authorities said.
Supporters of Acoli and Chesimard argued that they were ambushed and shot with their hands in the air as part of law enforcement's targeting of black activists, including the FBI Cointelpro project to disrupt what the agency called "black nationalist hate groups."
Their separate trials drew white and black protesters to the Middlesex County Courthouse. Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
State law at the time allowed for the possibility of parole.
In the first few years of his sentence, Acoli tried to escape a few times, according to authorities: twice from state prison in Trenton, and once from a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where he had been transferred.
For the past decade, he has been in a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa. Prison officials there said he refused requests from The Star-Ledger for an interview.
Harper, who still lives in New Jersey, did not return messages seeking comment.
Foerster's widow and son declined comment.
In 1993, Acoli sought parole and was denied.
In its written decision, the Parole Board cited Acoli's admitted attraction to the revolutionary atmosphere of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, his description of himself as a prisoner of war, his contention that he killed Foerster in self-defense and his record of disciplinary charges.
Since then, Acoli has largely avoided trouble, recently earning a favorable progress report from a U.S. Bureau of Prisons case manager for his work ethic and educational pursuits.
His lawyers say he has two daughters and two grandchildren willing to take him in.
"There is no legal reason to hold him in. He is rehabbed," said lawyer Florence Morgan. "We're not disputing this was a serious crime. But to continue to use that as a basis for denying parole would mean it would never be granted.
"It is not the purpose of the Parole Board to deny someone otherwise eligible for parole based on hysteria or extraneous pressure."
"I understand there are people who don't want him paroled, but there's no evidence to support a denial," added Fayemi Shakur, a 27-year-old Newark resident who coordinates the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign. "There's more evidence supporting his release."
State Police Sgt. Kevin Tormey, a terrorism investigator, said there's plenty of reason to keep Acoli in prison.
"The BLA had declared war on law enforcement," Tormey said. "They basically executed Foerster and took his life for their cause.
"He and trooper Harper didn't know they were at war when they stopped that car. Acoli has never expressed any remorse or admitted guilt."
Catch as catch can; State aims to put prison escapees living overseas back behind bars
March 22, 2004
The trail is old and long, but not quite cold.
In August 1970, murderer George Wright and armed robber George Brown walked off the dairy farm at Bayside State Prison in Leesburg and disappeared. The black militants surfaced two years later on a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to Miami, which they and three others hijacked at gunpoint to Algeria.
They are still on the lam, along with nearly 140 other fugitives who have escaped custody in New Jersey over the last 34 years.
Most walked away from halfway houses, though two dozen were serving prison sentences for crimes ranging from drug possession to murder when they fled. Now, prison officials are stepping up their efforts to apprehend five of the escapees who made it out of the country and are hiding overseas. It would be a first. New Jersey has never succeeded in extraditing a prison escapee from another country.
"If they're still here on this planet, we're going after them, we're going to get them, and that's that," says state Corrections Commissioner Devon Brown. The commissioner says he's committing whatever money and diplomatic efforts are necessary, and has sought help from the governor's office, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark.
The state's first target in its overseas crackdown is Manny Farina, who was 20 when he was jailed in 1986 for a string of assaults, burglaries and thefts in Essex County. Less than a year later, he bolted from a minimum- security unit of Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in New Lisbon. He ended up in South America, where investigators say he bounced from country to country, ending up in Colombia. He recently was taken into custody there on drug charges.
"We've been tracking him for several years, and we are going to extradite him very shortly," said Debbe Faunce, the Department of Corrections' chief investigator.
Brown said he has agreed to spend about $15,000 to send Essex County prosecutors to Colombia to bring Farina back.
"What we're saying is, if it costs us to come after you, we'll bear that cost and there will be consequences for what you've done," Brown said.
The most notorious of the international outlaws is Joanne Chesimard. The State Police's most wanted fugitive, Chesimard was sent to prison for the 1973 murder of a state trooper, but escaped to Cuba, where she won political asylum. Law enforcement officials acknowledge that her return is virtually impossible under Fidel Castro.
Brown also wants to apprehend Zladko Mujadzic, who beat a man to death in Burlington County in 1976 at the age of 18. After five well-behaved years, Mujadzic was put on a beach cleanup detail. He walked away.
Mujadzic fled to the former Yugoslavia, where investigators believe he remains, perhaps in a psychiatric hospital. But they're not sure. They've placed alerts with Interpol, the international police agency. Nothing has panned out.
The job of hunting Department of Corrections fugitives falls to five investigators in the Special Investigations Division. As part of a newly created New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force, the team receives help from federal and local agencies. Often, members of the State Police fugitive squad ride with them.
"We go after these people and we don't stop," said Supervising Investigator Ellis Allen.
Most of their time is spent chasing the hottest leads, which tend to be local. In what little downtime they have, they follow tips on the older cases, including those overseas.
Fugitives generally don't stray far. When they're caught, it's usually at the homes of girlfriends or mothers or neighborhood pals. Of the hundreds of people who flee every year, the vast majority walk away from halfway houses, the last stop before rejoining society. Most are caught within a day or two.
Often, the fugitives simply tire of the chase and turn themselves in. Sometimes they're dimed out by relatives sick of watching them sit on the couch all day. Others, unable to find legitimate work, return to crime and get caught. Some die.
But occasionally, they keep running. And in rare instances, they make it abroad.
State officials don't anticipate many problems returning Farina to New Jersey. Colombia's government makes it relatively easy to obtain a fugitive, officials say. France, however, has been known to resist extraditions, particularly those of murderers. That's where investigators say they believe Wright and Brown now reside.
Their marijuana-fueled 1972 hijacking, in which they forced federal agents dressed only in bathing suits to deliver $1 million in cash to their DC-8 airliner in Miami, is one of the most brazen on record.
Wright, 29 at the time of the hijacking, had been convicted of murder and armed robbery and was serving a 15- to 30-year sentence at the time of his escape. Brown, then 28, was serving three to five years for a 1967 armed robbery in Elizabeth when he fled. They met in prison.
Both were members of the Black Liberation Army, a loosely affiliated group of black militants who advocated armed resistance to racial oppression. They and their fellow hijackers were living together in Detroit, where they boarded the Miami-bound jet on July 31. For the hijacking, Wright disguised himself as a priest.
They released the 86 passengers unhurt after receiving the $1 million, then forced the crew to fly to Algiers, where they sought political asylum. Authorities there released them days later, but not before seizing the $1 million, which they returned to the United States.
Investigators in New Jersey are not sure how the hijackers made it to France, but in 1978, French authorities sentenced Brown and three others, including Wright's common-law wife, Joyce Tillerson, to short prison terms for air piracy. Attempts to extradite them to the United States failed, investigators say.
Wright was never prosecuted. Authorities believe both men still live in France. Tillerson recently died there.
FBI Special Agent R.J. Gallagher maintains a file on Wright at the bureau's office in Red Bank and helps the Department of Corrections track him. He says he stays motivated by keeping in touch with Walter Patterson's two grown daughters. The World War II veteran was 42 when he was shot to death in a holdup by Wright and an accomplice at a Wall Township gas station in 1962.
The daughters, Ann and Kaye Patterson, said in a statement last week that Wright's escape has left their psychological wounds unhealed.
"There is no statute of limitations on murder," they said. "There is also no statute of limitations on the heartache and emptiness the innocent victims live with forever."
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