Biography
Yvette Kelly was a Black liberation activist charged as a New York 8+ defendant in the October 1984 federal RICO indictment alleging a conspiracy to free Sundiata Acoli, commit armed bank expropriations, and bomb federal buildings. She was arrested on October 18, 1984, when 400 FBI agents staged pre-dawn raids just three days after the new federal preventive-detention law took effect — prosecutors immediately sought to hold the defendants without bail on the political nature of the charges, making the case an early test of the 1984 Bail Reform Act. In August 1985 the jury acquitted the New York 8 of all RICO and conspiracy counts. Friends and family of the defendants, including a 15-year-old, were subpoenaed to a grand jury and refused to collaborate.
