This is a good companion piece to that “Days of Rage” post that was going around a few months ago.

Gives context for how things felt “from the other side”, also gives some color to the radical lawyers that got filed as “institutions”. Reminds you they were going to trial, arguing that their clients were revolutionaries more legitimate than a tyrannical standing government, and seeing that affirmed by lawfully constituted juries.

Which is a downright English faith in the ability of the people to use the law to challenge the regime, honestly. That’s where we were in the 70s.

In one direction, consider how the emergence of these radical lawyers connects to the post-war expansion of higher education access. In another direction, consider this as the context for Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill and 1996 AEDPA. Remember, the function of Bill Clinton was to relegitimize the Democrats as an executive party by renouncing the ‘70s.

That’s also the context for my take on Mumia Abu-Jamal, which was still a cause even in Naomi Klein-era The Nation. I think he probably did kill officer Daniel Faulkner, I doubt that Ed Rendell and the Philly PD - still substantially organized as a direct tool of violence - acting “properly” could have won a conviction in the formal justice system operating under period constraints.

And that the outcome - leaning on the system to yield conviction, result that he’s neither ‘70s-style freed or directly punished with extrajudicial violence, an optimistic intention of the death penalty in the ‘80s eventually ground down to indefinite imprisonment… well, that’s the story of American crime policy since.