Biography
Roger Champen was one of the Attica Brothers — prisoners indicted after the September 1971 uprising at New York's Attica prison and its bloody suppression, in which the state killed dozens of inmates and hostages. A leader during the rebellion, he became an assistant coordinator of the Attica Legal Defense Committee and himself faced a three-count murder indictment, among the scores of charges (ranging from murder to "possession of prison keys") that Governor Nelson Rockefeller's special grand jury handed down against the prisoners — while the officials responsible for the retaking of the prison went uncharged. The Attica prosecutions of the inmates were eventually largely abandoned, and in 1976 Governor Hugh Carey closed the books on the cases. Documented in The Black Panther (December 8, 1973).
