After prison, Al-Amin built a national Muslim community from Atlanta's West End, becoming one of American Islam's most respected leaders. In March 2000, two Fulton County deputies serving a warrant were shot, one fatally; Al-Amin was captured in Alabama and convicted in 2002 of murder, receiving life without parole — despite the dying deputy's description of a shooter who did not match him, the survivor's initial account of hitting the gunman (Al-Amin was unwounded), and a later confession to the shooting by another man, Otis Jackson, which the courts declined to hear.
Transferred into the federal supermax system — years at ADX Florence and beyond, far from Georgia — the aging imam remains, for the movement, the last SNCC political prisoner: a case in which supporters see five decades of government pursuit of the man who was once H. Rap Brown.