Ex-Panther accused in ’69 cop shooting to surrender
CHICAGO — A former Black Panther Party member accused of shooting a police officer in 1969 and then fleeing to Canada wants to return to the United States to stand trial on the charges filed against him.
Chicago authorities claim Joseph Coleman Pannell, now 58, shot Officer Terrence Knox after the officer stopped him for questioning outside a South Side store. Pannell was free on bond in that case in 1973 when he fled Chicago.
Pannell, who changed his name to Douglas Gary Freeman and was a library research assistant outside Toronto, has waived extradition and will return to Chicago within 30 days, his attorney, Neil Cohen, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Pannell has been jailed since his 2004 arrest in a suburb of Toronto. A judge in 2005 ordered Pannell returned to Chicago to face trial on charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery. But his lawyers appealed, saying Pannell would not get a fair trial in the U.S.
Knox was on patrol when he approached Pannell, then 19 and AWOL from the Navy, and asked why he wasn’t inside a nearby high school.
Knox said he almost lost his right arm because of the bullet wounds, and his life was saved when a fellow police officer stuck a finger into his arm to stop the bleeding from a torn artery.
Pannell was arrested in 1971, skipped bail, then was rearrested in 1973 and skipped bail again, court records show.
Knox said Philip Cline was the only Chicago Police superintendent since 1973 to take an interest in tracking down Pannell. The cold-case squad started investigating the case after Knox met with Cline in 2004.
“My position is the same,” said the retired Knox, who lives in southwest suburban Orland Park. “I want the court system to do its job. If he is innocent, I will shake his hand. If he is guilty, I will slam the door behind him and never look back.”
Rosa Parks to be inducted into Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame
MARION, Ala. — Rosa Parks, the black seamstress who helped launch the civil rights movement, will be inducted this year into the state Women’s Hall of Fame.
This is the first year that Parks, who died in October 2005 in Detroit at age 92, is eligible; women must be dead for at least two years before being considered. She will be this year’s sole inductee.
“Rosa Parks was a woman of silent dignity and grace whose life changed the state, the nation and the world,” said Valerie Pope Burnes, director of the Hall of Fame.
Parks was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. Her arrest prompted blacks to boycott the city’s bus system and led to a Supreme Court decision ending segregation in public transportation.
Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.
The Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame, founded in 1970, is at Judson College in Marion.
Youths throw stones at police car, McDonald’s restaurant outside Paris
PARIS — Youths threw stones at a McDonald’s restaurant, a bus and a riot police van in a Paris suburb where riots broke out months ago, police and local officials said.
No one was injured. The incidents in the northern Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel appeared to be a flare-up of violence that has long simmered in poor neighborhoods where many immigrants and minorities live. Police said there did not appear to be a specific trigger for the incident.
About 20 youths first pelted a police van with stones at about 6:30 p.m. last Wednesday, then targeted an empty city bus. They moved toward a nearby McDonald’s, breaking windows at the restaurant, police and the local prefecture said.
Officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the group, a security official said.
Riots broke out in November in Villiers-le-Bel after two teens were killed there in a motorcycle crash with a police car, and the unrest spread. Lakamy Samoura, 15, and Mohsin Sehhouli, 16, were not wearing helmets and their bike wasn’t authorized for public roads. Police insisted the crash was accidental, but many youths blamed the officers and launched into riots.
Riots raged in impoverished suburbs nationwide for three weeks in 2005, a symptom of the anger in poor housing projects where many Arabs, blacks and other minorities live, often isolated from mainstream society.
Successive governments have struggled with the question of how to integrate minority youths from poor neighborhoods into French society. Heavy state investments have done little to improve housing and create jobs in the depressed projects that ring Paris.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to unveil a new plan to help the troubled suburbs next month.
Conn. judge bumps school desegregation issue back to lawmakers
HARTFORD, Conn. — The landmark Sheff vs. O’Neill school desegregation case, which has been the focus of litigation in a Hartford courtroom for months, has been sent back to the state legislature.
The case had returned to Superior Court last July in the form of a legal motion citing the failure of the legislature to approve a tentative agreement.
After months of testimony and closing arguments, the judge last Thursday told both sides that he’s putting court action on hold until either the legislature has a chance to act on the plan, or it is withdrawn.
The agreement at issue calls for the state to spend more than $100 million, mostly on new schools that would attract white suburban students to heavily minority Hartford.
