[Freethe SF8] Interview with Richard Brown

[SF-8 case]

http://revcom.us/a/113/sf8-interview-en.html

Interview with San Francisco 8 Defendant Richard Brown


San Francisco 8: A Case of Injustice and Torture

The Revolution Interview is a special feature to 
acquaint our readers with the views of 
significant figures in art, theater, music, 
literature, science, sports, and politics. The 
views expressed by those we interview are, of 
course, their own, and they are not responsible 
for the views expressed elsewhere in Revolution.

Eight former Black Panthers were arrested January 
23, 2007 and charged with murder and conspiracy 
related to the killing 35 years ago of a San 
Francisco police officer. This is not the first 
time these same charges have been brought against 
some of these defendants. Similar charges were 
thrown out in the 1970s after it was revealed 
that police used torture to extract confessions 
in New Orleans in 1973. It appears that the 
government plans to introduce the same torture-tainted evidence in 2007.

This case comes at a time when the government is 
openly justifying the use of torture and 
attacking fundamental rights. Bill Goodman, Legal 
Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, 
said, “The case against these men was built on 
torture and serves to remind us that the U.S. 
government, which recently has engaged in such 
horrific forms of torture and abuse at places 
like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, has a 
history of torture and abuse in this country as 
well, particularly against African Americans.”

The Black Panther Party was a powerful 
revolutionary force in the 1960s and early 1970s. 
They stood up to police terror, they popularized 
the Red Book of Mao Tsetung, they put revolution 
on the political map in the U.S. in a way that 
had never really been done before. They drew 
support from millions, both among the basic 
masses and from more privileged sections of 
society. For this the government viciously 
attacked them, and they have never forgiven or 
forgotten this, attacking former Panthers as well 
as trying to erase their revolutionary legacy. 
And this is especially true in the current 
situation with the many crimes of the system 
intensifying, including importantly the 
oppression of Black people, and with many people 
of all nationalities looking to resist and seeking answers to big questions.

The case has begun to generate significant 
support, although much more is needed. Rappers 
Mos Def and Talib Kweli have appeared at programs 
for the SF8 that have drawn hundreds of people 
from the community, including many youth. 
Ozomatli had SF8 members introduce their four San 
Francisco concerts and their L.A. dates as well. 
Hearings for the 8 have been packed with 
supporters. Recently the City of Berkeley passed 
a resolution calling for all charges to be 
dropped. Two Nobel Laureates, Archbishop Desmond 
Tutu and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, have initiated 
a petition signed by human rights and religious 
groups demanding that the charges be dropped on 
the SF8, that the government launch an 
investigation of the allegations of torture, and 
that Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim be freed immediately.

The San Francisco 8 are Richard Brown, Richard 
O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, Francisco 
Torres, Harold Taylor, Herman Bell, and Jalil 
Muntaqim. Bell and Muntaqim have been held as 
political prisoners for over 30 years in New York State prisons.

Revolution sat down with Richard Brown, one of 
the San Francisco 8, to talk about the case and 
its importance. Richard Brown has worked for the 
last 25 years as a community organizer with the 
Ella Hill Hutch Center in the Western Addition in San Francisco.

*****

Revolution: Could you tell me about the charges 
against you and the other defendants who make up the San Francisco 8?

Richard Brown: We’re being charged with the 1971 
Ingleside Station attack where a police sergeant 
by the name of John Young was murdered. Because 
we were Panthers we are being charged with that 
murder and conspiracy to murder police officers 
and commit certain crimes. This was brought up 
for the first time in the 1970s. When the case 
was taken to court, the three people charged, 
John Bowman, Ruben Scott, and Harold Taylor all 
stated that they were tortured and forced to 
confess. Because of that and the fact that they 
were questioned without any attorney being 
present in New Orleans, the court threw the 
so-called “admission of guilt” and the case out. 
In January of this year, 2007, they rearrested 
eight of us for the same crime and the same 
charges and as far as we can tell from what we’ve 
heard in court they plan to use the same 
“confessions” that were ruled illegal in the 
first place. If you go according to what they 
said in court, what they’ve presented so far, 
they don’t even have any new evidence. We are 
being recharged with the same thing again which 
was already stated as illegal back in the 1970s.

Since then I might add that a lot of things have 
changed because of the Patriot Act and Homeland 
Security and the environment of the country 
period where they feel that they can come back 
and use what they couldn’t use before because 
it’s not so clear whether [the torture] is illegal or not.

Revolution: Could you give people a picture of 
the torture that took place in New Orleans?

Richard Brown: Three members of the Black Panther 
Party­John Bowman, who was a San Francisco 
Panther; Ruben Scott, who was a San Francisco 
Panther; and Harold Taylor, who was a Panther 
from Los Angeles­were arrested in New Orleans in 
1973. Actually they arrested 13 Panthers. They 
were separated and for days they were tortured. 
They were stripped naked, handcuffed, isolated, 
repeatedly beaten, denied sleep, food, and all 
that type of stuff. They were beaten around the 
stomach and back. They used slapjacks on their 
shins and legs, where torturers are trained to 
beat people so the wounds don’t show. They used 
what is called waterboarding now. Technically 
what they were using were hot and wet blankets. 
Also plastic bags were placed over their heads 
until the point where they would pass out. They 
used electrical cattle prods to their private 
parts and to their anus. Their treatment was so 
inhumane it’s hard to even describe, let alone 
endure. And my friends who had to endure this, I 
see how this has affected them. How they look 
when they describe it. It’s horrifying and it’s 
hard for me to even talk about it, honestly and 
truly. It’s horrible for human beings to treat someone else like that for days.

They tortured them like that for three or four days.

Revolution: There were two San Francisco police 
who participated in the torture in New Orleans. What’s their role?

Richard Brown: Ed Erdelatz and Frank McCoy were 
San Francisco homicide detectives and had run-ins 
with the Panthers long before the Ingleside case. 
In 1973, they were in New Orleans. Their part was 
that they never actually touched them. They would 
come into the room along with the detectives from 
New York, Los Angeles, and the FBI. They would 
come in and ask questions and if the questions 
weren’t answered to their satisfaction they would 
leave the room and the New Orleans Police 
Department would come in and they would start the 
torture. Actually the torture started before the 
questioning even started. They arrested them, 
took them in, stripped them, isolated them and 
just started beating them. They just enjoyed 
torture. They would do a job on them and then 
leave and tell them ‘we’ll be back.’ Then the 
detectives would come in and start asking 
questions. First they would try and tell the 
detectives that they were being tortured and then 
the detectives would get up and walk out of the 
room and the New Orleans police would come in. 
This went on for days. They would keep them up at 
night, not allow them to sleep. Wake them up 
every hour or so. Throw water-soaked blankets on 
them, scalding hot water so they couldn’t 
breathe. This is the treatment that they had to endure for days.

Ed Erdelatz and Frank McCoy were the ones who in 
2005 came knocking on people’s doors during the 
grand jury investigation asking, ‘Do you remember 
me?’ and giving us subpoenas to appear before a 
grand jury. They were brought out of retirement 
and deputized by Homeland Security in order to do 
these cold case things [opening previously closed 
cases involving the Black Panther 
Party­Revolution] that were going on nationwide.

Revolution: What happened with the grand jury investigation?

Richard Brown: When they first came and wanted to 
talk to us we were told that they wanted to 
question us about white people that we knew. But 
once they started asking questions it was clear 
that they were interested in Black people’s role 
in the Ingleside attack. They had made up their 
minds already that the Panthers had to be 
responsible for this. It was a situation where 
they were trying to make the evidence fit the 
theory, and they’ve been trying to do that ever since then.

In 2005 we all refused to testify before the 
grand jury. Five of us were held in contempt of 
court: Hank Jones, Ray Boudreaux, Harold Taylor, 
John Bowman (now deceased) and myself. We were 
held in contempt of court and locked up until the 
Grand Jury expired. We were released on October 31, 2005.

Revolution: How long were you locked up for?

Richard Brown: I was locked up for about a month. 
People were locked up at different times 
depending on when we were called in front of the 
grand jury for questioning. I think Hank Jones 
was first and he was in the longest. John Bowman 
was the last and he was only locked up for eight 
or nine days. I think Hank did something like two 
and a half months. We weren’t guilty of any 
crime. We were just standing on the fifth 
amendment and because of that I was taken away 
from my family, locked up. I was transferred all 
around. Nobody actually knew where I was, 
including my attorney. It would take days for 
them to find me and then when they did find me, 
I’d be transferred to another place. They just 
messed with us as usual to put pressure on us or 
to just be vindictive, whatever motive people 
like that have, that’s what they were doing. I’m 
sure they always have some motive in their 
twisted mind about why they torture people or why 
they lie about people or why they kill people, 
why they lock people up for life knowing that 
they are innocent. They can obviously justify 
that shit in their mind because they do it and 
they’re still here and they continue to do it. I 
find it difficult to see and understand though.

Revolution: Could you speak a little more about 
why you decided not to cooperate with the grand jury?

Richard Brown: First of all because they’re 
trying to convict me of something that I am 
innocent of. The grand jury is trying to go along 
with this story that was concocted in New Orleans 
by the conglomerate of agencies that were there, 
putting together a case involving torture that 
was targeting me and saying that I was a part of 
it. And now you ask me to go before a grand jury 
and participate and say something so that it can 
be used against me. I know that as a Black man in 
America and as a Panther I have not been treated 
fairly by the judicial system in the courts. 
Every time I have gone to court I have never seen 
justice, so why would I? And we’re talking about 
a murder, a homicide, and they want me to 
cooperate with them? And I know from the facts 
that all this is bullshit; they are trying to 
convict me of something that I am not guilty of.

Even if you could get past all that, these same 
people, Ed Erdelatz and Frank McCoy, the police 
departments, and the FBI and the rest of them 
tortured my friends. It’s pitiful. I truly will 
never get over that, what they’ve done to my 
friends. I will never, ever cooperate with people 
like that. I will have no respect for them. I 
don’t like them. I think they should be arrested 
and held accountable for the crimes that they 
committed back then. Until that happens they can 
forget about me even having a decent word to say 
to them. I don’t want to have nothing to do with 
them and I’m sure the rest of the people share 
that. I will never cooperate with them, I didn’t then and I never will.

The things that were done to the Black Panther 
Party by the Cointelpro and by the local police 
departments all across the country and the way I 
was treated every time I went to court, I have 
nothing but disdain for them. Even if there was 
something to cooperate about they couldn’t get it from me.

Revolution: You started talking about Cointelpro 
and we were talking about it a little earlier. A 
big part of the background to this case is 
Cointelpro, the Counterintelligence Program by 
the FBI that targeted the Black Panther Party. 
Could you speak to what Cointelpro was and what 
it did, both any personal experience you have as well as its overall role?

Richard Brown: What they did overall was destroy 
the Black Panther Party as it was. Their job as 
the Counterintelligence Program was to destroy 
the movement period, all of the progressive 
political movements that were going on at that 
time. If I’m not mistaken at that time [FBI 
Director J. Edgar] Hoover declared the Black 
Panther Party the greatest threat to the nation’s 
internal security. And we in the Panthers, even 
at the time he was saying that, had no idea, I 
actually don’t even remember him saying that. I 
was too busy as a Panther trying to do something 
to serve my community. I was a young Black man in 
a community of Black people. And Black people at 
that time were in a world of trouble­actually 
today we still are. We had nothing in the world 
going for us. The government didn’t represent us 
at all. They weren’t doing anything for us. The 
only thing we saw every day was repression from 
the police department as an occupying force in 
our community, trying to keep us in line or 
intimidate us from doing anything against the 
other parts of society. We were the lowest on the 
totem pole. We didn’t have decent housing, we 
didn’t have decent food, we didn’t have decent 
schools, we didn’t have decent jobs­we had no 
jobs. So when the Black Panther Party came along 
and said we can do all this stuff for ourselves, 
people like me and hundreds of other young people 
joined the Party in order to serve the Black 
community and to help the people. We were 
interested in feeding children, getting people to 
organize, to unify, to bring about the vote so 
that we could control the politicians in our 
community, to putting together schools for our 
children, clinics­all of the things that the 
government had failed to do for us we were 
willing to do for ourselves and we were beginning to do that.

For this the counterintelligence program deemed 
us the number one threat in the United States and 
focused on us with an intensity that I to this 
very day find astonishing. I didn’t believe it at 
all back then. None of us believed that the FBI 
and the Counterintelligence Program and all of 
these agencies were spending all this money, 
going through all these tricks, doing everything 
they could to undermine our efforts to help our 
people­framing us, using up all our resources by 
taking us to jail every other day, falsifying 
documents and evidence to send people to jail for 
life to get rid of them and destroy our 
leadership, torture and even murder. It has been 
proven that they were guilty of all of that. We 
honestly did not know that they would do 
something like this, that they were doing it. I’m 
still finding out things that the Cointelpro did today.

In the 1970s the Senate’s Church Committee 
investigation found that the Counterintelligence 
Program was illegal and unconstitutional. A 
couple of agents were even found guilty of some 
charge but they never did any time because their 
sentence was commuted by the president. He 
decided that we should forgive and forget. But 
here I am, almost 40 years later, not forgiven 
and forgotten­and I’m not even guilty! These 
people were guilty of those crimes.

Revolution: This case goes back more than 35 
years. Why do you think they are bringing it back now?

Richard Brown: Number one, they want to legalize 
torture. They felt this would work for them 
because we are all Black people and it’s easier 
to find Black people guilty than it is to find 
white people or anyone else guilty. It’s a 
ready-made case for them. They thought they would 
be able to turn the public against us because a 
police officer lost his life, especially with 
eight Black men accused. They want to see if this 
case will fly because of the new laws and the 
doing away with of certain constitutional rights 
that we used to have. They call it ‘relaxation,’ 
that they’ve temporarily taken them, but we don’t 
have them any more. They feel that if they can do 
it with us and get away with it then they can 
push it forward and take it nationwide to anyone 
and everyone who is opposing and will oppose them 
because of the direction that this country is 
going in. They are alienating all of the masses 
and they have to find some way to keep them in 
line and intimidate people so that they know that 
“if you go against us we ain’t going to never let 
it go. We’ll come back at you time and time 
again. You will suffer. So you better think twice.”

Revolution: Two of your co-defendant,s Herman 
Bell and Jalil Muntaqim, have been in jail for 
the last 30 years. I know you wanted to speak about their situation.

Richard Brown: Them and all political prisoners 
who are still suffering behind the 
Counterintelligence Program or Cointelpro. It has 
been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that 
people were framed, that evidence was 
manufactured, that people were paid to lie, they 
withheld evidence that could prove people was 
innocent. The case of Geronimo ji Jaga who was 
framed and did 27 years before the government was 
forced to admit that they knew he didn’t do it. 
They withheld the evidence that could prove that 
he was somewhere else when the crime was 
committed. These types of things are what I would 
really like America to understand and take a good 
hard look at. Not only does it affect us, Black 
people at this particular time­and most of the 
political prisoners though not all are Black. But 
I would like all of the political prisoners’ 
cases to be reopened. I would like everyone who 
was touched by the counterintelligence program in 
any way, for their cases to be revisited and for 
something to be done in order to remedy the situation.

You have people still to this day like Herman and 
Jalil who are locked up only because of the 
participation of the Counterintelligence Program 
and how they went about conducting their business over the years.

I was framed, just blatantly framed, given a 
case. At the time I was raising nine children in 
the same house. And they took me away from my 
family for over two and one half years behind 
that crap. I still say I was fortunate because I 
didn’t have to stay in for 27 years or 35 years 
like some of my other comrades who are still 
locked up today. And I could have been in prison 
much longer if it hadn’t been for the attorneys 
who were able to legally get me out and prove that I was innocent.

This has to change. We have to do something. We 
have hundreds and hundreds of people all over 
this nation who are locked up in prison and who 
it appears have no chance of ever coming home 
because of the Counterintelligence Program and 
what it did to them. The masses are not in charge 
of when they come home or don’t come home. This 
fascist government is still saying we deem these 
people a threat just like they deemed me a threat 
for trying to feed children in the Black 
community. And they’re not going to release them 
and that is one of the biggest crimes being committed by this government.

Revolution: What gives you the strength to carry on the struggle?

Richard Brown: The love for my 
great-grandchildren, my grandchildren and my 
children, my love for the people. The fact that 
I’m just not the type of person who’s just going 
to lie down and take anything. You hit me, I hit 
back. I believe in people. That’s another thing 
that the Party taught me, that true power comes 
from the people. I love the masses. I actually 
love America and I love the American people. 
There’s a difference now. I’m not talking about 
the American so-called government. The so-called 
President and his administration, if you go by 
the definition of what a president is, he doesn’t 
fit that. He fits more of the definition of a 
dictator and therefore he’s in charge of a 
regime. It has nothing to do with the American 
people. I believe that the majority of the 
American people are decent people who believe in 
freedom, justice and equality for all, who truly 
want this to be “the land of the free and the 
home of the brave.” It is not that but it can be 
that, and I have faith that it will be if we 
continue to try and bring forth the 
contradiction, which is what I’m doing and 
educate people to get them to understand the true 
picture of what’s going on so that things will be 
better not just for my grandchildren and 
great-grandchildren but for everybody’s children.

I can’t stop. If the people understand and take 
control like they can, they can turn this around 
and they will. As long as I can be effective and 
as long as I can try to continue to do that, I’m 
going to be working toward that. I guess I’m 
doing this out of love for the people and love 
for peace and freedom. And until we get it I’m going to continue to fight.

Revolution: Anything else that you want to add?

Richard Brown: Again, political prisoners and 
prisoners of war. Honestly and truly I want 
people to understand and take a good look at 
that. We started the Committee for the Defense of 
Human Rights, that’s what the SF8 has started. 
And out of this we want to reopen an 
investigation of the Counterintelligence Program. 
It’s kind of silly to think that the government 
is taking freedom and constitutional rights away 
from us and we’re talking about investigating an 
agency that did the same thing that the 
government is doing now. It’s in order to get the 
people of the United States to understand what’s 
truly going on and until we paint a clear picture 
of what happened and what is happening now 
political prisoners don’t have a chance of coming 
home. We not only want them to come home, we want 
people who are guilty of these crimes against 
them and against all of us to be held accountable.

Honestly and truly when I think of Jalil and 
Herman and other political prisoners I feel real, 
real, real bad. I feel like I’m not doing enough. 
You asked me what keeps me going. The love that I 
have for those brothers, who gave so much because 
of their love of the people, and who’re suffering 
like they are. And I want to stop that.



To follow developments in the case of the San 
Francisco 8 see their website: www.freethesf8.org

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