American Justice on Trial – Book Discussion and Signing

Lise Pearlman, retired judge and legal expert, will speak about her new book American Justice on Trial at the bookstore, which outlines how the defense during the Huey Newton murder trial worked to lessen racial bias in jury selection and put into place legal and cultural precedents that still affect American jurisprudence, criminal law, and race relations.

On the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Pearlman’s new book American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton compares the explosive state of American race relations in 1968 to race relations today with insights from key participants and observers of the internationally-watched Oakland, California death-penalty trial that launched the Black Panther Party and transformed the American jury “of one’s peers” to the diverse cross-section we often take for granted today. The book includes comments from Newton prosecutor Lowell Jensen, pioneering black jury foreman David Harper and TV journalist Belva Davis, as well as from Huey Newton’s older brother Melvin Newton, former
Panthers Kathleen Cleaver, David Hilliard and Emory Douglas. It also includes comments from civil rights experts including Bryan Stevenson, Barry Scheck and John Burris. This book complements the nonprofit documentary project
of the same name for which Pearlman is co-producer/co-director on behalf of Arc of Justice Productions, Inc. http://www.americanjusticeontrial.com/

Lise Pearlman appeared in Stanley Nelson’s acclaimed 2015 film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution as the country’s leading expert on the 1968 Huey Newton death penalty trial. Her first history book, The Sky’s TheLimit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20th Century? (Regent Press, 2012) won awards in the categories of law, history and multiculturalism. Pearlman was an undergraduate in the first class that included women at Yale University when Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale was tried for murder in New Haven. She then moved to the Bay Area where she attended Berkeley Law School and then clerked for California Chief Justice Donald White before practicing law in Oakland. From 1989-1995, she served as the first Presiding Judge of the California State Bar Court. Pearlman has spent almost all of her adult life in Oakland where the Newton trial took place and where she still resides.