Verdicts

Juries last week pondered the evidence in two notable criminal cases:

> Nearly two years after he went underground, Black Radical H. Rap Brown surfaced in a 1971 Manhattan gunfight with police. Shot and arrested, he and three others were charged with the robbery of patrons of a West Side bar and the attempted murder of three policemen. Despite the five-lawyer defense team, which included William Kunstler, Brown won a limited right to act as his own co-counsel. In a rambling opening statement he told the jury, "Truth is the eye of the storm and I myself no more than a raindrop looking for a fertile place to fall." He never directly answered the charges or appeared as a witness under oath, and the chief defense contention seemed to be only that the defendants had all been innocent bystanders. The jury deliberated for three days and convicted all four of the robbery and assault on one policeman. But the jurors were hopelessly deadlocked on the attempted murder charge because they were unable to decide on the issue of intent. The sentence on the other charges could still run to 50 years, however. And Brown also faces trial on charges of inciting a riot in Maryland as well as a five-year sentence, which he is appealing, for carrying a carbine across state lines while under indictment on the Maryland charge.

> Ever since the brutal slaying of United Mine Workers Reformer Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter, Special Prosecutor Richard Sprague has suspected that "the person who set this chain of events in motion" was former U.M.W. President W.A. ("Tony") Boyle. After convicting the actual killers, Sprague has been trying to nail men higher and higher in the union command. Last week it was the turn of William J. Prater, a former U.M.W. organizer, who transferred $20,000 in funds allegedly used to hire the assassins. Prater's lawyer noted that four of the five already convicted had turned state's evidence; "they decided there was only one way they could save their skins," he said, "to lay the blame even higher." The jury decided that the blame belonged there, and Prater was convicted of first-degree murder. That left one other union official who is already facing trial, and Sprague remains determined to keep poking upwards until he has gotten everyone responsible.

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