Biography
Warren William Wells was a captain and sergeant-at-arms of the Black Panther Party who was wounded in the April 6, 1968 West Oakland gun battle in which the police killed 17-year-old Bobby Hutton and wounded Eldridge Cleaver. Indicted with seven co-defendants on attempted-murder and assault charges, Wells was tried separately; after two trials ended in hung juries, a third found him guilty of assault with a deadly weapon while acquitting him of attempted murder, and he was given an indeterminate term of 1 to 15 years. The conviction was later reversed on appeal over the composition of the Alameda County grand jury (In re Wells, 1971). He became a leader of the California prison movement and a co-author of the 1970 Folsom Manifesto, and died in 2001. (Not to be confused with the NFL player of the same name.)
