Trials: The New Haven Eight

For a fleeting hour last week, it seemed more like a reunion and a radical talkfest than a murder trial. In an empty New Haven, Conn., jury room, Black Panther Chairman Bobby Scale met and embraced his old friend, Panther Defense Minister Huey P. Newton. Court proceedings and stints in jail had kept them apart for nearly three years. Now Newton was present as a spectator, and Scale as a witness in the trial of Black Panther Lonnie McLucas. Said Newton of the encounter: "It was beautiful. I had heard Bobby was fasting, but he looked like he was putting on weight."

Newton's mood was a mixture of the chipper and the defiant. During the court session, he and Scale exchanged the clenched-fist salute. Later, at a press conference, Newton accused the trial judge, Harold Mulvey, of being biased in favor of the prosecution—though the jurist has impressed most disinterested observers as fairminded. When pressed to talk about the plight of McLucas, Newton declaimed about conditions in Angola and the Panthers' communications with Hanoi. The real issue, however, was much closer to home. McLucas, 24, is the first of eight Panthers, Scale among them, to be tried on charges that include conspiracy to kidnap and murder Alex Rackley, a party member who was suspected of being a police informer.

Confession. Yet the presence of the nationally prominent Panther leaders almost obscured the McLucas case. It was ostensibly in McLucas' behalf that Scale, whose own trial will come later, voluntarily appeared as the last defense witness. "The Chairman," as Scale repeatedly referred to himself, was of little help to McLucas.

Prosecutor Arnold Markle has eyewitness statements from two participants in the crime, George Sams Jr. and Warren Kimbro, implicating McLucas in the torture and murder of Rackley. Markle also has a confession from McLucas made to an FBI agent that he fired the second shot into Rackley. Both Sams, a former bodyguard for Stokely Carmichael, and Kimbro, a Connecticut Panther leader, have pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Sams' testimony named Scale as the man who gave the murder order in May 1969.

The crucial issue in the case is the credibility of Sams and, to a lesser degree, of Kimbro. Sams' claim that he was acting under orders from Scale conflicted with earlier testimony from Kimbro. Kimbro had said that the order to take care of Rackley came from Rory Hithe and Landon Williams, members of the party's national leadership who are currently fighting extradition from Colorado. Sams also contends that on the night of the torture, Scale visited Kimbro's house, where Rackley was being held, and gave Sams the order to "do away with him." In court testimony Kimbro alleged that McLucas was a consenting member of the plot to kill Rackley.

Water Torture. McLucas' only real defense has been to maintain that he had no foreknowledge of the plan and that he was coerced by Sams. Defense Attorney Theodore Koskoff, a self-described member of the establishment who took the case to "see if the System works," has continually stressed Sams' history as a mental defective with sadistic tendencies. Witnesses, both for the defense and the prosecution, attested to Sams' violent nature.