Photos: Twitter
Mutulu Shakur (shown above with step-son Tupac Shakur) was not sentenced to die in prison, but die in prison he may. The 71-year-old icon of Black liberation struggle has been incarcerated for over three decades. The rules governing his 1988 sentencing set his presumed release date for 2016.
Yet, despite an impeccable institutional record, he has been denied release by the federal parole commission nine times. He remains behind bars, while an incurable cancer is now spreading through his bone marrow.
Reforms and policy shifts in certain state parole systems, including New York’s, have seen the long overdue release of a number of aging former Black Panthers like Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim in recent years. Held in the federal system, however, longtime prisoners like Shakur face further layers of institutional intransigence and procedural arcana.
Shakur, the stepfather of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, was convicted of racketeering conspiracy charges alongside a number of Black liberationists and leftist allies for his involvement in the 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored truck during which a guard and two police officers were killed. He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur.
A member of the Black nationalist organization Republic of New Afrika who worked closely with Black Panther Party members and New Left activists, Shakur was at the forefront of liberatory struggle. As a renowned acupuncturist, he was a central figure in the movement to bring holistic health care and self-determination to Black residents in the Bronx in the 1970s, blighted as the New York City borough was by police violence, poverty, and heroin addiction. That landed Shakur in the crosshairs of the federal government’s malicious COINTELPRO campaign to decimate racial and social justice movements.
Yet the demand for his release now has nothing to do with the political underpinnings of his arrest, trial, and conviction. If any party is displaying ideological excesses, it is the federal justice system apparently acting against its own standards in the case of a Black liberation elder.
“Dr. Shakur is a 71-year-old man who has been imprisoned for over 35 years, undergoing treatment for bone marrow cancer,” Shakur’s attorney, Brad Thomson of People’s Law Office, told me. “He has been praised by current and former Bureau of Prisons staff, and BOP’s own assessment tools establish that he poses absolutely no risk, should he be released.”
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