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Two former members of a militant black power group convicted of killing two New York City police officers in 1971 are again seeking parole.
But this time, Anthony Bottom and Herman Bell will appear before the state Parole Board after admitting to the slayings.
“As long as they keep admitting they’re political prisoners, then they aren’t taking responsibility for their actions,” said Diane Piagentini, the widow of one of the slain officers, Joseph Piagentini, who still lives in the same Deer Park home she bought with him before he was killed at 28. “They should never be paroled.”
The case dates to the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers called the Black Liberation Army sanctioned symbolic killings of police officers regardless of their race in New York and California and robbed banks to finance its activities, authorities have said. Declassified documents show the FBI then initiated a covert campaign to infiltrate and disrupt the BLA and other violent radical movements.
BLA members Bell, Bottom and an accomplice, who died in prison in 2000, called themselves the “New York 3.” They denied killing the officers and insisted they’d been framed during their trial and after their convictions in 1975. Five years ago, they accepted plea deals and served probation sentences for their roles in the killing of a police sergeant shot inside a San Francisco station house.
In their 2012 appearances before parole officials, both men admitted their roles in killing Piagentini and Officer Waverly Jones, 33. The officers were shot multiple times after they’d responded to a report of a domestic dispute at a Harlem housing complex on May 21, 1971. Prosecutors said it was a trap set by Bell and Bottom.
“I began to see things in a way that I wanted to come clean,” Bell said in 2012, according to a transcript. “I wanted to accept that fact that I committed this offense, I wanted to show remorse, but I didn’t really know how to express that to the Board.”
AP/Canadajournal
