David Rice (also known as Mondo we Langa; 1947 – March 11, 2016) and Edward Poindexter (died December 7, 2023) were African-American activists charged and convicted of the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard.
The two men had been targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which operated against and infiltrated anti-war and civil rights groups, including the Omaha Black Panthers.
He wrote for the local underground paper, Buffalo Chip, from 1969 to 1970 and was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP).
[3] He played guitar at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, a center of progressive activism in the 1960s and 1970s under the pastorate of Fr.
In March 1968, riots in Omaha led to the shooting of a local high school student during an event in support of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign.
In July, a warrant was issued to the ATF to search NCCF headquarters for 60 machine guns and 180 sticks of dynamite.
The Omaha FBI called the Justice Department in Washington because they had an informant in the NCCF chapter and knew there were no machine guns or dynamite located there.
At 2 a.m., a call was made to the Omaha police 911 operator reporting a woman dragged screaming into a vacant house at 2867 Ohio Street.
He cannot remember details of his story, such as the name of a woman who drove him from NCCF headquarters to David Rice's house to pick up the suitcase bomb.
At the trial, he would change his testimony to implicate another NCCF member, when his new testimony was that Raleigh House drove Duane with a suitcase full of dynamite to David Rice's house, Edward Poindexter took three sticks to make the bomb and put the remaining sticks in a box, which he took into the basement.
He refused to say that he attached the bomb to the floor, which annoyed Art O'Leary who told him on page 25, "As a practical matter, it doesn't make any difference what the truth is concerning you at all."
In an interview with the Washington Post on January 8, 1978, County Prosecutor Art O'Leary admitted that he had made a deal with Duane Peak to prosecute him as a juvenile in return for his testimony.
At a preliminary hearing on September 28, Peak took the stand and recanted his story, testifying instead that neither Poindexter nor Rice were involved.
Peak was at that time wearing dark glasses, which he removed at the request of Rice's attorney, David Herzog.
Peak replied in the affirmative to both questions, telling the court that his lawyer was not present when he discussed his confession with county attorney O'Leary.
The case was built upon both Duane Peak's testimony and ATF laboratory analysis of a piece of wire and pliers found in David Rice's house.
The type of dynamite the police claimed to have found in David Rice's basement was similar to residue from the bomb.
The chemist, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lab tech Kenneth Snow, conceded at the trial to defense attorneys that these traces could have come from matches.
To establish the characters of the pair, the prosecutor presented the court with newsletter articles in which Rice and Poindexter publicly advocated violence toward police.
Poindexter went to a movie with a girl named Linda Walker, who was the daughter of a New York City police officer.
Will Peak provided Poindexter with an alibi for the night that he was accused of building the bomb in David Rice's kitchen.
Norma Aufrecht, who allegedly drove Duane Peak from NCCF headquarters to David Rice's house, did not testify.
An FBI memo dated 10/13/70, released after a Freedom of Information Act request, quotes Omaha Assistant Chief of Police Glenn Gates as advising that "any use of tapes of this call might be prejudicial to the police murder trial against two accomplices of PEAK and therefore... he wishes no use of this tape until after the murder trials of PEAK and the two accomplices has been completed."
Former Nebraska Governor Frank B. Morrison, who had represented Poindexter at his trial, is quoted: "The reason they were suspected was because they were members of the Black Panthers.
"[citation needed] In a 1990 British documentary made by George Case and Joe Bullman of Twenty/Twenty Productions, the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Jack Swanson, affirmed the Omaha Police Department's fear of the Black Panther Party: "We feel we got the two main players in Rice and Poindexter, and I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party ... completely disappeared from the city of Omaha ... and it's ... been the end of that sort of thing in the city of Omaha — and that's 21 years ago.
"[14] When David Rice applied for a writ of certiorari, per the new rules promulgated under Stone v. Powell, he was told it was too late.
After COINTELPRO became public (in 1971) and the Freedom of Information Act was amended (in 1974), Rice and Poindexter were able to access their FBI files.
In 1978, Amnesty International published a report finding that irregular conduct by the FBI during its COINTELPRO operations had undermined the fairness of trials of a number of political activists during the 1970s.
This led to the 1980 conviction (and 1981 pardon by President Ronald W. Reagan) of FBI Director L. Patrick Gray and Agent Edward S. Miller.
However, beyond the general campaign to discredit and smear BPP members, the particular links between COINTELPRO and this case were uncertain until Senator Chuck Hagel facilitated release of over a thousand pages of relevant documents in 2001.