Biography
Veronza Leon Bowers Jr. was a member of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was arrested in 1973 in connection with the June 1973 killing of U.S. National Park Service ranger Kenneth Patrick at Point Reyes National Seashore in California. The federal prosecution rested almost entirely on the testimony of two government informants who received reduced sentences on unrelated charges in exchange for their testimony. He was convicted in 1974 of first-degree murder of a federal officer and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Under the federal sentencing structure in effect at the time of his conviction he became eligible for mandatory parole on April 7, 2004 after 30 years served. The U.S. Parole Commission has repeatedly denied his release in defiance of the mandatory-parole statute, drawing federal litigation across two decades. He was finally released from the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina on May 24, 2024 — age 78, after 51 years in federal prison and ranking as the longest-held federal political prisoner in U.S. history. The Jericho Movement and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation made his case a central campaign for decades.
Veronza was a member of the Black Panther Party who was convicted in the murder of a U.S. Park Ranger on the word of two government informants, both of whom received reduced sentences for other crimes by Federal prosecutors. There were no eye-witnesses and no evidence independent of the informants to link him to the crime. At trial, Veronza offered alibi testimony, not credited by the jury. Nor was testimony of two relatives of the informants who insisted that they were lying. The informants had all charges against them in this case dropped and one was given $10,000 by the government according to the prosecutor’s post-sentencing report. Veronza has consistently proclaimed his innocence of the crime he never committed, even at the expense of having his appeals for parole denied for which an admission of guilt and contrition is virtually required.
