Biography
Martin Sostre was the owner of a Buffalo, NY bookstore which was the city's center of Black radicalism. Martin gave out free pamphlets, let people read for free, and fostered Black education in the city. A year after opening the bookstore, in 1967, Martin was arrested on charges later determined to be fabricated as a part of COINTELPRO. He was sentenced for over forty years, five of which he would spend in solitary confinement. Amnesty International claimed that Martin has "been the victim of an international miscarriage of justice because of his political beliefs... not for his crimes"
NY Governor Hugh Carey granted Martin clemency in 1975.
In April 1974, federal Judge John T. Curtin denied Sostre a new trial, ruling the recantation of the State's star witness Arto Williams — who had admitted under oath in May 1973 that he helped officer Alvin Gristmacher and Erie County Sheriff Michael Amico frame Sostre in July 1967 — "unworthy of belief," even as Gristmacher stood charged in the theft of half a million dollars of heroin from the police narcotics locker. Right On! reported that Sostre had by then spent 14 months in solitary at Clinton, beaten six times by guards, and faced a possible life sentence on pending charges of assaulting the very guards who attacked him (Right On!, May 1974).
