On Thursday, May 29, in a story completely ignored by Seattle's TV, radio, and daily newspapers, one of the country's most prominent and longest-held political prisoners had his conviction overturned. Later this month, for the first time in nearly 30 years, Black Panther activist Geronimo ji jaya Pratt may walk the streets a free man.

In a scathing decision, Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey ruled that Pratt's 1972 conviction for murder was invalid and that the Los Angeles District Attorney's office had withheld key information during the trial, information that made it "...reasonably probable that (Pratt) could have obtained a different result." Among other things, Pratt was convicted almost solely on the basis of the testimony of one eyewitness, who was later revealed to be an FBI informant; the FBI had, in internal memos, targeted Pratt for "neutralization"; and, according to defense attorneys, FBI surveillance proved Pratt's contention that he was 400 miles away, in Oakland, at the time of the shooting.

Despite the visibility of Pratt's case, his long-overdue court victory was virtually ignored by media outside California. Sadly, even when injustices are 30 years old, the myth that the U.S. has no political prisoners remains powerful among mainstream political circles and the public in general. What coverage does exist relegates cases like Pratt to an aberration of history; surely, such miscarriages don't happen in today's enlightened times.

They do, of course. Pratt, and another California prisoner, Native American activist Norma Jean Croy, who was released earlier this year, are the exceptions. There are a handful of internationally notorious cases: Leonard Peltier, who, 20 years ago this month, was arrested and subsequently railroaded for murders the state knows he did not commit; Mumia Abu-Jamal, an articulate Philadelphia journalist still on Pennsylvania's death row and rumored to be facing a new death warrant this summer; the nine MOVE members from Philadelphia, all convicted of firing one fatal bullet in 1985; the surviving Branch Davidian members in Texas, silenced and marginalized to keep the public from worrying too much about the state's mass murder of some loony cult members. In Washington state, anti-war activist Mark Cook was denied parole (again) on May 22, having now served over two decades for helping to bomb a Seattle bank--a crime he would have been paroled for many years ago, given his spotless prison history, were he not black and unapologetic. And there are dozens, hundreds more, less well-known, people like Puerto Rican independence advocates and New Afrikan activists, folks without wealthy white liberal celebrities championing them. Most--surprise- -are people of color.

These are all people put in or kept in prison, and often segregated into the harshest prisons and control units, specifically because of the political content of their actions. As with every other country that jails and brutalizes political activists (many of them U.S. clients--Indonesia, Israel, Peru), the U.S. writes the laws, then claims the person(s) in question violates them, then rams the case through a hopelessly biased court system, usually well out of public view. It's how Ken Saro-wiwa died in Nigeria. It's how Mumia Abu-Jamal may well die, and how Leonard Peltier, now in ill health, is in danger of dying. Despite the financial hazards for human rights groups condemning the U.S., Pratt is one of the U.S. prisoners Amnesty International has identified as a "Prisoner of Conscience." Only inside the U.S. is this country's practice of targetting activists not taken at face value for what it is: persecution, and, in the case of control units, torture.

Beyond the "neutralization" of individuals, however, a case can be made that the whole class of people newly incarcerated in the last decade--as the prison population of the U.S. has tripled, largely with nonviolent offenders--is a form of political imprisonment. The conscious decisions to wage a pointless War On Drugs, the dramatically tougher sentencing laws, the building of new and often draconian prison complexes, the development of prison labor, and the gutting of state social services have all served to push a well-defined (poor, non-white) segment of our country into the "justice" system for strictly political purposes.

At the legislative level, as with this month's stadium vote, it's easy to see who politicians work for. A quick trip to King County Jail or Monroe State Penitentiary will show all too clearly who those same politicians have been working against. Geronimo Pratt's freedom is significant not just for the justice of his case, but because we will gain an eloquent new spokesperson who can attest, though his own story, that political imprisonment is alive and well in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Unless that story is told widely, it's likely to get worse rather than better.

The L.A. District Attorney now has two weeks to decide whether to retry Pratt. Retrial seems unlikely, but then, unlikelier things have happened in this country's sordid history of stifling voices of dissent. Let them know that the news is out, and we expect Pratt, after all these years, to be set free:

Gil Garcetti L.A. Dist. Attorney 218 W. Temple St. Los Angeles CA 90012 213-974-3501 fax 213-974-1484.

Numerous groups and publications work locally to support this forgotten issue. Among them: