ABOUT THE BOOK: Anyone fascinated by true crime and legal thrillers will want to read The Sky's The Limit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20th Century? In comparing the 1968 trial of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton to other riveting American trials from 1901 to 1999, author Lise Pearlman revisits historic legal battles featuring murder, rape and kidnapping, skeletons in celebrity closets, class warfare, fixing the World Series, evolution versus creationism, abuse of power and political conspiracy. Each "trial of the century" serves as a window into its own era, but the author asserts that the Newton murder trial following a shootout with two Oakland policemen--where the accused revolutionary put America itself on trial for 400 years of racism-should head the list. It drew an international spotlight on a superpower rocked by two political assassinations and bitterly divided over the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. At the time, the FBI considered the Black Panthers the greatest internal threat to America's security. So did Party spokesman Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened revolution if Newton were condemned to die. The author contends that the jury's surprising verdict still reverberates today-had it turned out otherwise Barack Obama would likely not be President. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lise Pearlman was an undergraduate at Yale during the murder trial of Panther Chairman Bobby Seale in New Haven and has lived most of her adult life in Oakland where the 1968 Huey Newton murder trial took place. She arrived in the fall of 1971 between Newton's second and third trials for the killing of Officer Frey. Now a retired judge, she practices as a mediator with Alternative Resolution Centers.

The Sky's the Limit People V. Newton, the Real Trial of the 20th Century?

History

Pearlman, Lise

Americas

Regent Press Printers & Publishers

American Justice On Trial: People v. Newton

ABOUT THE BOOK On the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Pearlman’s new book American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton compares the explosive state of American race relations in 1968 to race relations today with insights from key participants and observers of the internationally-watched Oakland, California death-penalty trial that launched the Panther Party and transformed the American jury “of one’s peers” to the diverse cross-section we often take for granted today. The book includes comments from Newton prosecutor Lowell Jensen, pioneering black jury foreman David Harper and TV journalist Belva Davis, as well as from Huey Newton’s older brother Melvin Newton, former Panthers Kathleen Cleaver, David Hillliard and Emory Douglas. It also includes comments from civil rights experts including Bryan Stevenson, Barry Scheck and John Burris. This book complements the nonprofit documentary project of the same name for which Pearlman is co-producer/co-director on behalf of Arc of Justice Productions, Inc. [www.americanjusticeontrial.com]. The nation is currently reeling from multiple shocks in July 2016. First, in early July, came yet two more videotaped incidents of police shooting to death black arrestees followed by a horrific sniper attack on Dallas policemen who were monitoring one of many Black Lives Matter protest rallies. Then came, on July 17, 2016, another attack on Baton Rouge police. The carnage and proliferation of demonstrations and hostile reactions in the aftermath of these shocking events have drawn renewed national focus to fractured police-community relations in cities across country, the very issue that gave rise to the Black Panther Party a half century ago. The two incidents did start out in similar ways. In the early morning of October 28, 1967, Oakland policeman John Frey stopped the car Newton was driving to write a ticket for an unpaid traffic fine. A shootout ensued that left Officer Frey dead and Newton and a back-up officer seriously wounded. Newton claimed to have been unarmed and the victim of an abusive arrest; no gun belonging to Newton was found. His death penalty trial the following summer drew international attention to whether any black man could get a fair trial in America. This book scrutinizes the 1968 Newton trial and its context and poses the same questions President Obama and others have recently addressed: what has changed in this country in the last half century and what has not? How do we best move forward? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lise Pearlman appeared in Stanley Nelson’s acclaimed 2015 film “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” as the country’s leading expert on the 1968 Huey Newton death penalty trial. Her first history book, The Sky’s The Limit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20th Century? [Regent Press 2012] won awards in the categories of law, history and multiculturalism. Pearlman was an undergraduate in the first class that included women at Yale University when Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale was tried for murder in New Haven. She then moved to the Bay Area where she attended Berkeley Law School and then clerked for California Chief Justice Donald White before practicing law in Oakland. From 1989-1995, she served as the first Presiding Judge of the California State Bar Court. Pearlman has spent almost all of her adult life in Oakland where the Newton trial took place and where she still resides.

Regent Press

With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century That Helped Shape Today's America

Lise Pearlman's With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century that Helped Shape Today's America takes a fascinating look back at headline-grabbing criminal trials from the early 1900s as a cultural backdrop for contentious issues we face as a nation today. In her first book The Sky's The Limit: People v. Newton, The REAL Trial of the 20th Century? these early trials were compared to the 1968 death penalty trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, which the author considered the real trial of the century neglected by most historians. Here, these riveting trials are reexamined with emphasis on the insights they provide to today's political climate. 
Pearlman's new book opens with a remarkable admission by former FBI Chief James Comey in a speech on Lincoln's birthday in February 2015: "All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo . . . that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups." He invited all Americans to re-examine our "cultural inheritance" with fresh eyes.
 That is what Pearlman's new book seeks to do. This well-researched volume takes advantage of the passage of time to put each trial into perspective from work done decades, sometimes even a century, later by investigative journalists and historians who unearthed far more evidence of what really happened in the events that made banner headlines in the early 20th century. She makes the case that by revisiting riveting high-stakes trials that still have ramifications today, we can gain a better understanding of the extent cultural bias has permeated the fabric of our culture -- and a better premise from which to move forward as a nation than the whitewashed history so many of us were taught in school.

Constitutional Law

Who was Fay Abrahams Stender? A giant among Movement lawyers from the McCarthy Era to the 1970s intent on forcing society to change. Friends could easily picture her as the heroine of a grand opera. A child prodigy, she abandoned the concert piano to become a zealous advocate for society's most scorned and vilified criminal defendants: from the Rosenberg espionage case during the Cold War to militant black clients, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton and revolutionary prisoner George Jackson, to prisoners in the "Dachau" of maximum security. Stender achieved amazing legal successes in criminal defense and prison reform before she ultimately refocused with similar zeal on feminist and lesbian rights.
 In May 1979, an ex-felon invaded her home and shot her execution-style after forcing her to write a note saying she betrayed George Jackson. She barely survived. Wheelchair bound and under 24-hour police protection, she then became the star witness in her assailant's prosecution. Awaiting trial in a secret hideaway in San Francisco, Fay told the few friends she let visit her there to "call me Phaedra," a tragic heroine from Greek mythology. Shortly after the trial, like Phaedra, she committed suicide. 
Set against a backdrop of sit-ins, protest marches, riots, police brutality, assassinations, death penalty trials and bitter splits among Leftists, this book makes for a compelling biography. Yet it delivers on a broader goal as well - an overview of the turbulent era in which Fay Stender operated under the watchful eye of the FBI and state officials. We not only relive Stender's story, but that of a small cadre of committed Bay Area activists who played remarkable roles during the McCarthy Era, Civil Rights Movement (including Mississippi Freedom Summer), the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests, and the rise of Black Power. 
Besides revolutionaries Huey Newton and George Jackson, Fay's life intertwined with: Jessica Mitford (who dubbed Fay her "frenemy'), Bob Treuhaft, Charles Garry, Bob Richter, Stanley Moore, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Stokely Carmichael, Cesar Chavez, Mario Savio, George Crockett, Joan Baez, Willie Brown, Ron Dellums, Jerry Rubin, Max Scherr, Jean Genet, Elsa Knight Thompson, Kay Boyle, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Angela Davis, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, and Mike Tigar, among others. 
By the fall of 1970, Stender had gained international press coverage as the most sought-after Movement lawyer in America. She had just achieved spectacular successes against all odds for two black revolutionary clients. The book also describes Stender's ultimate failure to surmount class and racial differences to make her clients' cause her own and how, as in a Greek tragedy, hubris led to her downfall. Fay's tragic end served as a sobering lesson to her Movement friends of the personal risks many of them had run. For many, her death symbolized the end of an era.

Call Me Phaedra: The Life and Times of Movement Lawyer Fay Stender

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away

In the depths of the Depression, millions worldwide followed every twist and turn of the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder. Yet what was reported was largely fake news. Nearly a century after undocumented immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the dastardly crime, questions still linger. If the wrong man was convicted, who did it? When? Why? Where? How? The shocking answers this book suggests have eluded all prior authors. Extensive research into dusty archives yielded crucial forensic evidence never before analyzed. Readers are invited to reexamine "the crime of the century" with fresh eyes focused on a key suspect - a tall man wearing a fedora that obscured his face. He was spotted with a ladder in his car near the Lindberghs' driveway early that fateful night. The police let an insider who fit that description oversee the entire investigation - the boy's father, international hero Charles Lindbergh. Abuse of power, amorality and xenophobia all feature in this saga set in an era dominated by white supremacists and social Darwinists. If Lindbergh was Suspect No. 1, the man who got away, what was his motive? Who else was involved? Who helped cover up the crime? Read this book and judge for yourself.

True Crime

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pearlman, Lise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pearlman, Lise

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pearlman, Lise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Sky's the Limit People V. Newton, the Real Trial of the 20th Century?

American Justice On Trial: People v. Newton

With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century That Helped Shape Today's America

Call Me Phaedra: The Life and Times of Movement Lawyer Fay Stender

The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away

The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away

With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century That Helped Shape Today's America

Call Me Phaedra: The Life and Times of Movement Lawyer Fay Stender

American Justice On Trial: People v. Newton