On April 2, 1969, 19 men and 2 women, a group known as the Panther 21 were arrested in a pre-dawn raid and indicted on charges of plotting to kill police officers and dynamite Midtown department stores, police stations, the railroad, and several monuments around the city. They included: Abayama Katara, Afeni Shakur, Ali Bey Hassan, Baba Odinga, Curtis Powell, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Jamal Joseph, Joan Bird, Kuwasi Balagoon, Kwando Kinshasa, Lee Berry, Lee Roper, Lonnie Epps, Lumumba Shakur, Michael Tabor, Richard Harris, Robert Collier, Sundiata Acoli, and Thomas Berry. The youngest defendant, Jamal Joseph, was still in high school, just 16 years old, when he was arrested.
New York police arrested Lee Berry, 25, a Vietnam war veteran, at the VA hospital while he was receiving treatment for epilepsy. From his hospital bed, Lee, like the others, was sent first to the Tombs, Manhattan's city jail, then to Riker's Island where he was held on an exorbitant $100,000 bond (approx. $750,000 in 2020).
As his wife, Marva, the Panthers, and their legal teams worked to free him, the terrible conditions at the jail and unrelenting abuse by some officers aggravated his epilepsy, putting his life in danger. For three months he received no medical attention. His condition was made even worse when he was transferred to Bellevue, the prison hospital, where a doctor "treated" his condition by performing a questionable surgery to remove his appendix on Christmas Day 1969. Only when another physician stepped in and took over his case did Berry get the treatment he needed. Dr. John Cordice, an African American surgeon, had saved Martin Luther King Jr. from a near-fatal stabbing in 1958. He protected Berry as he recovered from the surgery, treated his epilepsy, and helped him regain his strength so he could mount a vigorous defense.
On May 13, 1971, after the longest political trial in New York's history, it took the jury just 45 minutes to acquit all 21 New York Panthers on all 156 charges.