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[265] 10 Trials People who commit violent crimes are usually tried in state criminal courts, prosecuted under state statutes. If their victims are not satisfied with the results, they can petition the federal government to examine the crime under the lens of a federal statute, as in the case of constitutional violations of civil rights law. The U.S. Attorney General’s office handles these cases. Victims can also bring a civil action for damages; the remedy for damages is money, not a prison sentence. Three trials dealt with the Greensboro massacre: a state criminal trial for murder in 1980, a federal civil rights trial in 1984, and a civil trial brought by the victims in federal court in 1985. Marty ■ Believe it or not, the Klan and Nazi killers walked away free from all three trials. They were never punished, never spent one day in prison. How can the justice system acquit murderers who four TV videotapes show firing into a crowd and killing five people? Those three trials were all we did for five years. Despite the travesty of justice , we gained a lot, because the third, civil trial found the Greensboro Police Department jointly liable with the Klan and Nazis for wrongful death. The First Trial: North Carolina State v. Jack Fowler et al. Paul ■ The first trial was a setup from the beginning. As Lindsey Gruson reported in the December 9, 1979, Greensboro Daily News in “District Attorney Says He’s ‘Caught in the Middle of a No-Win Situation,” Greensboro district attorney Michael Schlosser announced on December 8 that he would try the Klansmen and Nazis for murder, but the DA stressed at his press conference that he saw us—not the Klan and Nazis—as his enemy. “I fought in Vietnam and you know who my adversaries were then,” Schlosser said. Then he added [referring to a recent letter in the Daily News] that most people in Greensboro “feel the communists got what one recent letter to the editor called ‘about what they deserved.’” Aghast, I read Schlosser’s statements in the newspaper. He was the one re- [266] Through Survivors’ Eyes sponsible for prosecuting the Klan. We, the victims, had no choice of lawyer in the state criminal trial. I was still in the hospital with bullet fragments in my brain, trying to relearn how to walk. Schlosser could not have demarcated himself more from us. Clearly, “our” lawyer was working hand-in-glove with those who were trying to get the Klan and Nazis off the hook. He was going to try to kill us a second time, this time in the courtroom by the so-called justice system. Marty ■ We tried to get a private prosecutor who would represent us and assist the DA in the prosecution. William Kunstler, a well-known civil rights lawyer in New York, offered to help us, but the DA rejected our proposal, stating [in the same article by Gruson] that a private prosecutor could lead to a “vindictive prosecution” that could “provide a forum through which the CWP could turn the trial into a political showcase.” One of the very few people who spoke out for our proposal was Duke history professor Syd Nathans, whose letter appeared in the December 12 Greensboro Daily News explaining why there should be a private prosecutor. Editor of the Daily News: I support the appointment of a private prosecutor to assist the DA’s office in the case of the Greensboro shootings. . . . Watergate appeared at first to be a minor burglary. Not until the right people were asked the right questions did it become clear that the break-in was part of a pattern of wide-ranging White House repression. The CWP view of a “conspiracy” against it may indeed be wide of the mark. Yet one can see why they might be suspicious: the police withdrew at the moment of confrontation; four of the five victims were labor organizers, the killings themselves were achieved with military precision. . . . That the prosecution should be vigorous is also important. It will have to contend against the notion that the “Death to the Klan” rhetoric got the CWP what it deserved. The provocation theory misses essential facts about the KKK . . . . Wherever the Klan has existed, . . . violence has been its companion and its instrument. Intimidation is its essence. There is a more disturbing fact. The Klan has rarely risen and has never existed for long without the tacit permission of the community to...

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