Panthers Want Inquiry On Killing

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32166, 9 December 1969, Page 17

Panthers Want Inquiry On Killing

fN.Z. Press .Assn.—Copyright! NEW YORK, Dec. 8. The killing of 28 Black Panther party members, mostly leaders, by police in less than two years has brought a growing call for an investigation into what one lawyer has called a nationwide pattern of police action against the Panthers, United Press International reported today.

The latest incident occurred last week in Chicago when policemen shot Fred Hampton, aged 21, a former National Association for the Advancement of Coloured

People youth chairman who was chairman of the Illinois Panthers, and Mark Clark, aged 22, a Panther official from Peoria, Illinois. Police said they opened fire, wound, ing four other Panthers besides killing Hampton and Clark, after Panthers shot at them.

The Panthers and their lawyers disagreed with the police version. They said Hampton was assassinated in his bed, and that an independent autopsy performed on his body confirmed their theory that he was murdered while he was asleep. The Panthers also opened for public inspection the fiveroom apartment where the shooting took place. They said bullet marks in the apartment did not indicate that a gun battle had taken place. On Saturday, the national director of the Congress of

Racial Equality (Mr Roy limes) sent telegrams to Pre. sident Nixon, the AttorneyGeneral (Mr John Mitchell), the Mayor of Chicago (Mr Richard Daley) and others asking for an investigation of all 28 deaths of Panther members in clashes with the police since January, 1968. This call was echoed by the executive director of the

Illinois division of the American Civil Liberties Union (Mr Jay Miller) who said either the National Commission on the Cause and Prevention of Violence or the Chicago Bar Association should investigate the latest killings. “The Chicago raid and killing seems a part of a nation-wide pattern of police action against the Panthers,” he said.

The president of the Illinois State conference of , the N.AAC.P. youth and college division (Mrs Gail Harris)

asked for a Justice Department investigation. In Kansas City, Mr Austin F. Shute, a former Jackson County prosecutor and prominent criminal lawyer who is representing some Panthers; said he was gathering evidence of "what appears to be serious and deliberate provocative acts on the part of a few white police officers ip the ghetto area of Kansas City. , , ; . i He said the Panthers in his eity had made many'provocative statements but had not committed violence. The police complained ab’oiit the Panthers but ■it was always the Panthers who ended up with cracked skulls . and broken ribs. He referred to an incident last- week “when eight police officers subdued four Panthers in police headquarters with night sticks, fracturing the skull of one of them.”