THE CASE
AGAINST PAROLE FOR BELL AND BOTTOM
THESE ARE
THE FACES THAT SHOULD BE FOREMOST
IN THE MINDS
OF THE NY BOARD OF PAROLE
TAGS:
1971 MURDER OF TWO NYPD OFFICERS, PO JOSEPH PIAGENTINI,
PO
WAVERLY JONES, NYPD, NEW YORK STATE BOARD OF PAROLE,
PAROLE
ELIGIBILITY AFTER KILLING A POLICE OFFICER, FLAWS IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM,
BLACK
LIBERATION ARMY, BLACK PANTHERS, CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT,
MLK,
MALCOLM X, DEEP SOUTH, JIM CROW, DIXIE HIGHWAY
(Monday February 17, 2014 32nd
Precinct, 135th Street, NYC)
The housing projects, apartment buildings and busy sidewalks of this
crowded predominately African American neighborhood are a long distance from
the upstate penitentiary where two of the three men convicted of the 1971
assassinations of two NYPD Officers are incarcerated. These two places are as separate in time as
they are distance; over four decades have passed and much about our City and country
have changed. Not time nor distance has altered
the fact that the two remaining convicts sentenced to terms of 25 years to life deserve
to be imprisoned until the time of their natural deaths which hopefully will be
many years in the future. During the past 40 years Herman Bell and Anthony
Bottom have acquired college degrees and enjoyed relative lives of ease behind
bars where they are still referred to, by themselves and others as, “political
prisoners”, a rather ignorantly narcissistic distinction for two cold blooded
“Cop Killers”. And let there be no
mistake about the facts of the matter: they casually dialed 911 to report a
problem at one of the projects near here, laid in wait for the Police to
respond and snuck up behind PO Piagentini and PO Jones shooting Jones four
times in the back of the head killing him on the spot. These thugs continued firing into Officer Piagentini a
total of 19 times even as he plead for his life. All the prison cell
conversions, model prisonership and degrees earned behind bars will never
redefine these two men and they should never be permitted to draw a breath of
fresh air beyond the walls and fences of the penitentiary.
Police Officers Piagentini and
Jones never had the opportunity to acquire college degrees, they worked hard
serving their City and tragically had their lives taken in as barbaric and evil
an urban ambush as our City has ever seen. These young men were never granted
the chance to raise families, enjoy life and live it to the fullest as they saw
fit. They signed on for a dangerous job
at a particularly dangerous time and paid the ultimate price; they made the
ultimate sacrifice and for what? Were
they struck down defending others? Had
they lost their lives while saving the life of another? No. They
were summarily executed by three ‘men’ so infused with racial hatred, virulent violence
and deep seeded evil and no amount of
time in prison can alter these facts.
GAMING THE SYSTEM
Bell and Bottoms became
eligible for parole in 1994. Every time they
have appeared before the Board of Parole they never uttered a syllable of
regret or remorse; actually, they refused and continued to refuse until 2012
that they were in any way even associated with the two heartless murders. It
was only in their Parole Hearings in 2012 that they admitted to each having “had
a role” in the slayings of Piagentini and Jones. Why did the same two “proud”
political prisoners remain silent for so many years? No one knows for sure but
once can fairly surmise the aging convicts must believe such admissions will
reflect positively on them as they face the Board of Parole soon. For 40 years
they would admit to nothing regarding that long ago night in Harlem. Why would
they. After all, they were greeted as “Heroes”
by fellow convicts and enjoyed that certain status that only applies in prisons
where a “Cop Killer” is treated with special respect and that was certainly the
case when they began their sentences in the early 1970’s.Perhaps they were so
comfortable in prison that they saw no interest in abandoning their cult status
as original members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The murderous uprising at the New York State
Prison at Attica was still fresh in everyone’s mind and as BLA “soldiers” Bell
and Bottom were highly regarded among their peers.
The prison culture as it was
when Bell and Bottom were in the earliest years of incarceration was one that
respected them for having done what they had.
In prison in those days to be a convicted “Cop Killer” was to have a
certain celebrity status in that twisted code that pervades every cell block in
every prison to this day. Bell and
Bottom were heroes to the other scum they shared space and time with. They had no reason to forfeit that status even
after they were eligible for parole; they both assumed their request for parole
would be rejected automatically so they kept their silent defiance until 2012.
What became different in 2012
that these men would finally admit to perpetrating the crimes for which they
were sentenced? There are likely several
reasons not the least of which is age.
These men are now in their 60’s, have been locked up for over 40 years
and apparently thought their admission of guilt would be the key to
freedom. But no amount of time can be
served that comes anywhere near commensurate with the premeditated murder of a
Law Enforcement Officer (LEO) or, truth be told, the murder of anyone. Bell and Bottom committed what were then
still Capital Crimes punishable by the sentence of death but subsequent to
their convictions their sentences were reduced to the 25 to life term. If New York State had kept capital murder on
the books these men would have been executed years ago. It was a change in the law not in the prisoners
that spared their lives.
As stated on the New York
State website section dedicated to the history of the death penalty here reads:
“In 1967, a compromise law was passed
allowing for a very limited death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court
invalidated all death penalty statutes in the country in Furman v. Georgia. The
New York legislature rewrote the state's statute in 1973, providing for a
mandatory death sentence for murdering a police officer, a correctional
officer, or a murder in prison by an inmate serving a life sentence. In 1977,
New York's high court effectively struck down the death penalty for the murder
of a police officer or a correctional officer, and a 1984 ruling struck down
capital punishment for murders committed by inmates serving life sentences,
effectively abolishing New York's death penalty. From 1978 until 1994, measures
repeatedly passed both houses of New York's state legislature that would have
expanded or reinstated the death penalty, only to be vetoed by governors Hugh
Carey and Mario Cuomo.”
THE NORTH BURNED TOO
After the Confederate States surrendered
to the Union at the Courthouse in Appomattox, African Americans who had lived for
generations on plantations working as slaves mounted a massive exodus to the
states due North. What is a segment of
Interstate 55 today was known in the earliest years of the 1900’s as the “Dixie
Highway”. Those who made the trek were
seeking good paying jobs in the industrial urban hubs of the Central Midwest
and all across what today is known as the Rust Belt. While many found factory or foundry jobs
these new arrivals to the “Big Cities” were not welcomed with open arms. They were forced to live if segregated
neighborhoods, earned less than their White counterparts did and suffered from
an often less obvious but perhaps more insidious form of racism. Soon there were sprawling urban ghettos in
cities from New York to Detroit.
While the Deep South and some
Northern cities were rocked by the institutional resistance to the Civil Rights
Movement, integration became encoded within the body of laws we are governed
by. However, down South Jim Crow Laws
died a slow, protracted death in some of the most virulently racists pockets of
Dixie but it was the peaceful, passive nonresistance techniques and the
leadership of The Reverend Martin Luther King and his closest advisors that
eventually persuaded more and more Americans that segregation, racial bias and
bigotry could no longer be tolerated. It was also during this time that the
Nation of Islam was beginning to attract followers including Malcolm X who
originally had no respect for Dr. King or his particular tactics. For some younger members of the “Movement”
Dr. King and his fellow clerics and legal cohorts were not moving fast
enough. These young men believed their struggle
with “The Man” and “Whitey” called not for passivism and reasoned debate,
legislative actions and patience but rather for a full blown “war” of
liberation. The Black Panthers was the
largest of these groups sprouting chapters in cities large and small, coast to
coast from the late 1960’s in to the early and mid-1970’s. They were the instigators of riots in many
Northern cities will large African American populations whose ancestors had
fled the South after they gained their freedom from slavery. Many of these cities had prominent predominately
or all “Black” neighborhoods where poverty, unemployment and subpar schools
were endemic. These neighborhoods proved
to be tinderboxes of anger and frustration and when the riots began in Newark,
Jersey City and Camden, Chicago and Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Baltimore, Watts
and South Central in Los Angeles and Oakland California, they raged on not for days
but quite literally on and off for months. The Black Panthers were indeed
producing a battlefield landscape within the confines of their own
neighborhoods in these cities as well as others. But their war was still not sufficient to
placate the most radically militant in their ranks.
Even within the more actively
aggressive and vocal organization, The Black Panthers there was a sect that decided
to make their “war” on “White Society” a reality. Thus, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) was
established breaking ties with the Black Panthers and they soon began making
headlines. They robbed banks in New
York, Chicago and Los Angeles as well as other locations using the stolen money
to finance their war. Theirs’s would
indeed be a war requiring safe houses, caches of firearms, ammunition, homemade
bombs – whatever they thought it took to wage battle. An oft spoken goal of the BLA was to kill
Police Officers where ever and whenever they could. They saw the Police as the most clearly
identifiable front of White Society, the very machinery of which had “kept the
Black man down”. The BLA in all their
belligerent rhetoric soon declared “open
season” on the Police who they also referred to as “Pigs”.
The three men who lured Officers
Piagentini and Jones to that Harlem housing project (one has already died in
prison) did so in order to ambush them; it was as simple and as sadistic as
that. Their actions in no way shape or
form ever constituted anything like an act of political protest – it was
murder.
WHY PAROLE SHOULD NOT EVEN BE AN OPTION
Bell and Bottom like so many
other brutal killers before them have their supporters on the “outside”. All too often we have seen a vile criminal
adopted as a cause celeb by rich and
famous activists of one kind or another.
In 1979 a young waiter in a Greenwich Village eatery was stabbed to
death by Jack Henry Abbot who was granted release from prison after
corresponding with the famous author Norman Mailer for years. Mailer managed to make Abbot’s case to the
Board of Parole, enlisted some of his well-placed, influential friends and, Jack
Henry Abbot walked out of prison. The young waiter, Richard Aden, himself an
aspiring writer and gifted musician, had his life taken while trying to break
up a fight between Abbot the career criminal and another patron.
There has been a good deal
spoken and written about how Bell and Bottom have been model prisoners as we
have mentioned previously. One article
noted that a recent interview conducted by someone from the NY Department of
Corrections determined that these men are very unlikely to return to murder or
law breaking. That may be so. However, the point of incarceration is
punishment for prior acts; these men were rightfully tried and convicted, duly
sentenced as a way to “pay” for their crime.
Redemption and rehabilitation are not issues valid to these impending
Parole hearings. Actually among all criminal
types the recidivism rates are astounding; our prisons are literally running
revolving door camps. If Bell and Bottom say they will never again take another
human life one must ask why they can say so with such certainty. Is it because their “war” is over? That they are no longer “political prisoners”
and, as such should be released?
The Board of Parole must ask
these questions and carefully consider the answers. In a truly just society every state would
have the penalty of death imposed on a person tried and convicted of the murder
of a Law Enforcement Officer. The Law
Enforcement Community (LEC) sometimes referred to as the Thin Blue Line is a
vital strand of fabrics woven into our society.
Each time a LEO is cut down in the Line of Duty the strands of that
fabric fray somewhat. The fabric as a
whole begins to loose its tautness, its integrity.
The life of an LEO is not
worth more than the life of any other fellow man, woman or child. The point is that a person willing and
capable of killing a Cop not only takes that singular life but also weakens the
concept of the rule of law and the men and women of the LEC who enforce our laws.. Cops do not keep the
peace; the concept of the Cops keeps the peace and it is that very concept, a
societal compact if you will, that there are laws governing our behavior in
this society and to murder a representative of the law is to advance the
decline of that conceptual certitude of the law.
Let’s hope and pray that the
Board of Parole does the right thing regarding Bell and Bottom.
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Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
