Rulings In 1969-1971 there was a series of criminal prosecutions in New Haven, Connecticut, against various members and associates of the Black Panther Party.

Under the Bureau's then-secret "Counter-Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered his agents to disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize radical groups like the Panthers.

Protesters met daily en masse on the New Haven Green across the street from the Courthouse (and one hundred yards from Yale's main gate).

On May Day there was a rally on the Green, featuring speakers including Jean Genet, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and John Froines (an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon).

[4] Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin stated, "All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts," while Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. issued the statement, "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of a Black revolutionary to receive a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." Brewster's generally sympathetic tone enraged many of the university's older, more conservative alumni, heightening tensions within the school community.

As tensions mounted, Yale officials sought to avoid deeper unrest and to deflect the real possibility of riots or violent student demonstrations.

Sam Chauncey has been credited with winning tactical management on behalf of the administration to quell anxiety among law enforcement and New Haven's citizens, while Kurt Schmoke, a future Rhodes Scholar, mayor of Baltimore, MD and Dean of Howard University School of Law, has received kudos as undergraduate spokesman to the faculty during some of the protest's tensest moments.

Ralph Dawson, a classmate of Schmoke's, figured prominently as moderator of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY).

In the end, compromises between the administration and the students - and, primarily, urgent calls for nonviolence from Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers themselves - quashed the possibility of violence.

On May 25, 1971 Judge Harold Mulvey stunned courtroom spectators by dismissing the charges against Huggins and Seale, saying, "I find it impossible to believe that an unbiased jury could be selected without superhuman efforts—efforts which this court, the state and these defendants should not be called upon either to make or to endure.

"[10] "Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale would have to stand trial for their lives because they had been unyielding in their efforts to forge liberating actions for Black people.

A string of violent confrontations with law-enforcement, along with the trials and convictions of national party leaders that followed, left the movement spent and adrift, and by the mid-1970s it was largely inactive.

[12] Although both were much too junior to have had any role in the actual legal defense, according to John Elvin of the conservative newsmagazine Insight on the News, "Insight reviewed biographies of Hillary Clinton by Milton, [David] Brock and Roger Morris for this story and lengthy selections from such other biographies as Barbara Olson's Hell to Pay.

This epilogue was detailed in an article "After 37 Years, Spy Comes In From Cold" by Paul Bass, author of Murder In The Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale and the Redemption of a Killer.

Detective Nick Pastore, who arrested Seale and brought him to New Haven to stand trial, went on to become New Haven's Chief of Police, widely renowned for his successful policy of community policing, and then headed a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC named Criminal Justice Policy.