The Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee revealed on Friday that the 84-year-old activist would soon be released.
“Ruchell ‘Cinque’ Magee is coming home! After 67 years of wrongful imprisonment, the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee is proud and overjoyed to announce that Ruchell Magee has won his release from California Medical Facility,” the group tweeted.
Magee has been in US prisons since he was 16 years old, having first been imprisoned in Louisiana under a rape charge for having a relationship with an older white woman. After being released in 1962, he was arrested again just six months later in 1963 on charges related to marijuana possession, kidnapping, and robbery, for which he was sentenced to seven years-to-life.
The solidarity group’s website describes the Los Angeles County Superior Court as having “railroaded” Magee with “trumped-up charges.”
16 December 2022, 21:23 GMT
However, on August 7, 1970, Magee appeared in court as a witness to an alleged murder of a prison guard, of which Black Panther Party (BPP) member James McClain was accused. That same day, another BPP member, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson, entered the courtroom with the intention of kidnapping Judge Harold Haley and demanding that Jackson’s brother, BPP Field Marshal George Jackson, and two other prisoners who together with Jackson formed the Soledad Brothers, be freed from San Quentin Prison.
Neither McClain or Magee knew of the plan ahead of time, but after being armed by Jackson, they joined the plot and freed the other prisoners in the courthouse.
Magee was held responsible for the entire affair, and during the trial for the Haley's death, police ordered Magee chained and gagged after he delivered a brutal indictment of the California prison system, which he characterized as “slavery.” Magee was also threatened with execution if he refused to incriminate his co-defendant, BPP member and scholar Angela Davis, who was accused of renting the van used in the getaway and acquiring several of the firearms they used.
Magee refused and Davis was acquitted, but he was to stay in prison for the next 53 years.
The Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee formed in 2019 as Magee’s chance at parole approached in 2024, although they have demanded he be freed before then, “especially because of his factual innocence, his age of 84 years old, and the risk of COVID-19 in California’s wretched prisons.”
Some of those freed in recent years include Mutulu Shakur, Jalil Muntaqim, Sundiata Acoli, Janine Phillips Africa and Janet Holloway Africa. However, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist accused of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, has struggled to obtain a new trial based on evidence that the trial in which he was convicted was heavily biased against him.