COINTELPRO's Black Nationalist Hate Groups program, ordered in 1967 to "prevent the rise of a messiah," worked through the courts as much as the streets. Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt was convicted in 1972 of a murder the FBI's own wiretap logs showed he could not have committed — freed in 1997 after 27 years when the courts found the state had concealed that its star witness was a police and FBI informer. Dhoruba Bin Wahad served 19 years before disclosure of hidden files overturned his conviction in 1990; the Omaha Two, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, remained imprisoned for life on evidence their supporters and the Amnesty movement never stopped contesting.

The New York 21's acquittal in 1971 — after the longest political trial in the state's history collapsed under its own informers — showed what juries did when they saw the machinery plainly. The frame-up cases remain the heart of the American political-prisoner movement, several still unresolved after half a century.