THE SKY’S THE LIMIT: PEOPLE v. NEWTON, THE REAL TRIAL OF THE 20th CENTURY?
Anyone fascinated by true crime and legal thrillers will be interested in Lise Pearlman’s
book scheduled for release by Regent Press this fall, The Sky’s The Limit: People v.
Newton, The Real “Trial of the Century.” This 1968 murder trial for the killing of Oakland
policeman
inspired
a
campaign
international
John
Frey
“Free
Huey”
that
drew
an
spotlight
on
Oakland on the heels of two
shocking assassinations -Martin Luther King, Jr. in
April 1968 and Sen. Bobby
Kennedy
in
June--
sandwiched between highly
credible threats of mass
insurrection at a time when
FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover considered the Black Panther Party the greatest internal
threat to America’s security.
National guardsmen surrounded the city of Oakland over Labor Day weekend 1968 as a
rare black foreman led the mixed race jury panel debating whether Newton should live
or die—an issue the prosecutors took completely off the table in
the O. J. Simpson case. Prosecutor Lowell Jensen still vividly
recalls that the entire city of Oakland came to a virtual standstill
on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 8, 1968, when the sequestered
jury returned with its verdict---a verdict which the author contends
still reverberates today. Yet somehow the significance of this
dramatic courtroom battle got lost over time and no one else lists
the Newton trial among even the top 40 trials of the 20th century.
The Sky’s The Limit reflects years of research into extensive original materials,
including unpublished private collections and interviews of Newton trial participants.
This book provides insight not only into the gradual empowerment of minorities, but also
to evolving recognition of civil liberties from the two-day 1901 murder trial of McKinley
assassin Leon Czolgosz to the 1971 ten-month trial of Helter Skelter’s Charles Manson.
In comparing famous trials from 1901 to 1999, Pearlman brings to life power hungry
politicians, celebrity and socialite miscreants, robber barons, perjurers, psychopaths,
anarchists, rogues and martyrs. She revisits larger-than-life legal battles featuring
murder, rape and kidnapping, the skeletons in the closest of the rich and famous, abuse
of power and political conspiracy. The pivotal cases of the 20th century include class
warfare, fixing the World Series, evolution v. creationism, government corruption, the
legitimacy of the Viet Nam War and Presidential impeachment proceedings. Many were
infected by public rage. Some ended unpredictably, some in horrible miscarriages of
justice. Each high profile trial served as a window into its own era, but the 1968 Newton
trial—where an accused murderer took the stand to put America itself on trial for 400
years of racism—may well have captured the essence of the century as a whole.
About the Author: Lise Pearlman is a retired judge, who has lived all her adult life in
the Bay Area, including nearly 40 years in Oakland, where the Black Panther Party was
headquartered and Officer Frey’s killing took place. Born in Connecticut, she lived in
New Haven during the Bobby Seale murder trial and graduated in the first class of
women at Yale in June 1971. She won recognition in 1984 as the first woman managing
partner of an established California law firm and in 1989 as the first Presiding
Judge of the state’s lawyer disciplinary court. She later was appointed by Mayor
Elihu Harris as one of the first three members of the Oakland Public Ethics
Commission and served as its second chair. She currently serves as an arbitrator
and mediator on the Northern California panel of Alternative Resolution Centers
and is active in several community groups, including Oakland Sunrise Rotary.