Nine adult MOVE members — Chuck, Debbie, Delbert, Eddie, Janet, Janine, Merle, Mike, and Phil Africa — were tried collectively for the murder of Officer Ramp. Judge Edwin Malmed convicted all nine in May 1980 and sentenced each to 30 to 100 years, telling a radio interviewer afterward, when asked who shot Ramp, "I haven't the faintest idea" — they had been tried, he said, as a family. One bullet, nine life-defining sentences: the case became a national emblem of collective political punishment.
The MOVE 9 spent nearly four decades in Pennsylvania prisons, repeatedly denied parole for refusing to renounce MOVE. Merle Africa died in prison in 1998 and Phil Africa in 2015; the seven survivors were finally paroled between 2018 and 2020, with Delbert Africa — the man beaten on camera in 1978 — released in January 2020 and dead of illness within six months.