Conspiracy Theory Allowed in Bingham’s Trial

A judge ruled Monday that lawyers for Stephen M. Bingham can attempt to show that prison officials essentially encouraged prison revolutionary George Jackson to make his fatal 1971 escape attempt from San Quentin prison.

Marin County Superior Court Judge E. Warren McGuire said the defense can pursue a conspiracy theory based on the contention that prison officials ignored evidence that Jackson was planning an escape. But McGuire granted a prosecution motion to exclude several other defense conspiracy theories from the trial of Bingham, 44, who is accused of smuggling a gun to Jackson during a visit at San Quentin.

M. Gerald Schwartzbach of San Francisco, one of Bingham’s lawyers, said the ruling was a small but significant victory for the defense. He said it allows defense lawyers to challenge the prosecution’s contention that strict security made it impossible for Jackson to have gotten a gun from anyone but Bingham.

“If you allow for the possibility that law enforcement people themselves didn’t follow the law, it opens a lot of other possibilities about where that gun might have come from,” Schwartzbach said.

Prosecutors allege that Bingham, who then was a young Berkeley lawyer researching a potential lawsuit regarding living conditions within California prisons, hid the 9-millimeter automatic pistol in a bulky tape recorder.

Jackson produced the gun as he was being returned to his cell after the meeting on Aug. 21, 1971. The escape attempt left six men dead, including three guards and Jackson.

Terrence R. Boren, the Marin County assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, had argued that four defense conspiracy theories were irrelevant to the question of whether Bingham supplied a gun to Jackson. But Boren took McGuire’s ruling in stride. “It really has no effect on my case,” he said.

Among the defense theories the judge excluded from the trial were ones alleging that Jackson had been encouraged to escape by agents for the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and other controversial government programs of the 1960s and ‘70s aimed at undermining left-wing political groups--including the Black Panther Party, of which Jackson was a leader.

The theory allowed by the judge focuses on a letter from Jackson to Black Panther Party member James Carr. The letter was found in the pocket of pants that Carr took to a Santa Cruz dry cleaner in January, 1971.

The letter describes Jackson’s urgent desire to escape and details one plan in which members of Jackson’s family were to hide two derringers in their shoes and smuggle them to him during a visit. Jackson also writes of the need for a four-wheel-drive escape vehicle and other preparations.

Schwartzbach said that the “pants-pocket letter” was passed on to top San Quentin officials, but that they did not alert guards within the facility and did not implement the usual precautions taken with high-risk inmates.

The defense attorney contended during a break in court proceedings that these oversights were meant to encourage Jackson to try an escape that would provide the government with an excuse to kill him.

During the trial, which is entering its fourth week, Schwartzbach and co-defense counsel Susan Rutberg have asked former guards about other ways Jackson may have gotten a gun, including the possibility he may have obtained one of the weapons carried by guards in the cellblocks against prison regulations.