Marin County courthouse incident
| Marin County courthouse incident | |
|---|---|
| Date | August 7, 1970 |
| Location | San Rafael, California |
| Goals | Freedom for the Soledad Brothers |
| Methods | Kidnapping |
The Marin County courthouse incident was an event which occurred on August 7, 1970, when 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson attempted to negotiate the freedom of the Soledad Brothers (which included his older brother George) by kidnapping Superior Court judge Harold Haley from the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The resulting shootout left four men dead, including both Jackson and Judge Haley. Two others were wounded. The event received intense media coverage, as did the subsequent manhunt and trial of Angela Davis, an ousted assistant professor from UCLA with connections to George and Jonathan Jackson, and the Black Panthers. Davis owned the weapons used in the incident.
In the summer of 1969, W.L. Nolen, a twenty-year-old inmate at Soledad prison who had been convicted in 1963 for robbery, began circulating a petition to file a lawsuit against the prison's superintendent, Cletus J. Fitzharris, charging that guards and officials at the facility knew of "existing social and racial conflicts" and that they had been seeking to excite them through "direct harassment and in ways not actionable in court", including the filing of false disciplinary reports and intentionally leaving black inmates' cells unlocked to put them in danger of assault.
He stated further that officials were "willfully creating and maintaining situations that creates and poses dangers [sic] to the plaintiff [himself]" and that he "feared for his life."
On January 13, 1970, three black prisoners were shot dead at Soledad by corrections officer Opie G. Miller. Nolen was among the slain, along with Cleveland Edwards, then 21, who had been convicted in 1967 of assaulting a police officer, and Alvin Miller, then 23, who had been convicted of robbery. According to Ellsworth Ferguson, an administrative assistant to Fitzharris at the time, a fight began during a scheduled exercise period for 15 inmates from the maximum security wing of the prison. During the conflict, two white inmates among the group were beaten to the ground and Miller was reportedly "fearful that several might be seriously hurt or killed." Officials later stated that it was "surmised" that the fight was racial in nature.
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