Perhaps trivia; but I'm glad to see the cases from the past, from the 70s are still being looked into. My young, naive life was changed irrevocably on August 7, 1970 in a Marin County courthouse.
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs08022003.html
snip:
A year before his murder, his brother Jonathan was involved in an attempt to help free George and two other men known as the Soledad Brothers. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson entered the Marin County Courthouse armed with a submachine gun. He hoped to force the release of the Soledad Brothers. These were three men -- his brother George, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette -- who were charged with the murder of two guards at Soledad Prison after a black prisoner who was also a Muslim was killed by guards. Jonathan gave guns to the three prisoners who were present in the court--John McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee, a jailhouse lawyer who was testifying at the trial of fellow prisoner McClain, whose trial Jonathan interrupted. The three then took the judge, prosecutor and three jurors hostage.
The Coastal Post (http://www.coastalpost.com/96/2/marinco.htm)
snip:
The judge was pushed into an elevator along with three women jurors, the assistant district attorney, Gary Thomas, and the other two blacks who were on trial with McClain. All were forced into a van outside the courthouse.
Sheriff Montanos was called and ran down from his office, drew his gun, but he couldn't do anything because the judge had a shotgun taped to his neck which could go off at any moment.
The first shot came from inside the van, and was probably the one which killed the judge. A San Quentin guard, then fatally shot McClain, who was driving the van. The assistant D.A. seized a gun and shot the remaining two prisoners, but he himself was wounded in the spine. Officers opened the van doors and removed the living, which included the three women jurors. Thomas spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He eventually became a judge himself and took pride in dedicating a stone memorial to Judge Haley.
Thomas said, "Judge Haley embodied the ideals of the Knights of the Round Table: 'Live pure, speak true, love Christ the King'."
The black activist, Angela Davis, was arrested after the serial numbers on the guns were traced to her. After spending 322 days in the Marin jail, she was tried and acquitted in San Jose.
--end snips.
You see, assistant district attorney Gary Thomas's daughter was my friend. I knew the family.
I witnessed first hand, not just the shock and horror throughout Marin, but what happened to this family, Gary Thomas' family. I witnessed courage and dignity. A "revolutarionary terrorist" changed her family, her life. Good, wonderful family. They stood together, and tall.
Ruminating and digesting, going about my business, background assimilation of data and events.. I found myself remembering Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, Angela Davis, and the murder of the presiding judge Haley. I was there, I was young. It was madness. This Soledad moment went down in my county, Marin. And was close to me by six degrees. Flashbulb memories of all the actions, reactions.
I, my family, and all around were horrified. I cried angry tears against "Black Rage" at the "Machine" - Murdering innocent people, regardless of race, class, profession who were doing what they had sworn to do -- and just so a special "interest group" could make a "political statement". This was so wrong. And so evil.
The shock waves which saturated the overshocked Marin Countyites were seized by "liberal leaders", and redirected, and spun. Marinites took an appeasement approach. And Marin then changed. It became a place I no longer knew.
Marin County changed.. from that point on. I saw it happen. I witnessed all that happened in the afterwards. That crime, in Marin, was the nexus point. Taliban Johnny came as no surprise to me.
And I've kept 'watch' ever since August 7, 1970.
Sad and terrible....