The program's most durable products were convictions. Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, the decorated Vietnam veteran who led the Los Angeles Panthers, was convicted in 1972 of a 1968 Santa Monica murder; the FBI possessed wiretap evidence placing him four hundred miles away in Oakland and concealed it, while the key witness hid that he was an informant for both the Bureau and the LAPD. Pratt served twenty-seven years — eight of them in solitary — before a judge vacated the conviction in 1997; the government later paid $4.5 million rather than defend the case.
Dhoruba bin Wahad of the Panther 21 was convicted in 1973 of machine-gunning two officers guarding a district attorney's home, after two trials ended without verdict; nineteen years later, FOIA litigation produced over 300,000 pages showing the case had been a COINTELPRO/NEWKILL operation and that the star witness's recantations were suppressed. His conviction was vacated in 1990. The two cases became the movement's proof text: that some prisoners called "cop killers" and "terrorists" were, on the government's own documents, targets first and defendants second.