Story and photos by C. Nellie Nelson
The case against the San Francisco 8 – defendants who have spent the last two and a half years facing controversial old murder charges – was largely dropped today without any of them doing any real time.
Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office had resurrected an old case and charged eight men in the 1971 killing of San Francisco Police Sgt. John Young. The court dismissed the case in 1975 after finding that New Orleans police officers tortured two of the suspects to make them confess. But with federal funding from the Bush Administration, the prosecutors compiled hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, citing fingerprints on a cigarette lighter as a recent development in the case.
And today, the whole ordeal looks like a phenomenal waste of time and taxpayer money.