Woman Will Fight Subpoena in Bingham Trial

A woman subpoenaed in the trial of former fugitive Stephen Bingham says she plans to fight the subpoena rather than testify about being approached in 1971 by people who asked her to help in a prison escape.

Lynn Urbank Wilson says she “could be a hostile witness” if forced to testify by prosecutor Terry Boren.

Bingham, 44, is charged with two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy for allegedly slipping a pistol to militant George Jackson during a visit at San Quentin prison. Boren says Jackson used the pistol to spark an escape attempt that resulted in the deaths of three guards and three inmates, including Jackson himself.

Boren says Wilson only recently was located in New York. She had been a legal investigator for Jackson’s attorney in the weeks before the Aug. 21, 1971, escape attempt and visited him regularly.

According to documents filed by Boren, Wilson was approached that summer by two men who claimed to be Black Panthers. The men asked her to smuggle liquid explosions to Jackson, who was a Panther leader.

“People asked me to bring things in but I told them, ‘I’m not going to bring anything in there,’ ” Wilson told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview.

At the time, she said, some people would have smuggled weapons to Jackson, “but not anybody like Stephen Bingham, not anybody with half a brain.”

Bingham’s attorneys have suggested government officials set up Jackson to get rid of him because of the notoriety he had gained through his 1970 book about prison life, “Soledad Brother,” and because he had rallied inmates around calls for revolution.

In Thursday’s testimony, a former San Quentin guard said relatives of Jackson tried to smuggle toy guns into the prison about three weeks before the 1971 escape attempt.

Former correctional Sgt. Walter Del Rose testified he thought the incident was a dry run to see whether real guns could be slipped past the prison’s metal detector.