Harold M. Mulvey; Judge in Black Panther Trials

Harold M. Mulvey, 86, a Connecticut judge who presided over the murder trials of Black Panthers in the 1970s. After a jury deadlocked on a verdict, Mulvey dismissed murder and kidnapping charges against national Black Panther leader Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, a leader of the group’s Connecticut chapter. They had been charged in connection with the torture and killing of Alex Rackley, a member of the New York chapter of the Black Panthers, who was suspected of being a police informant. In freeing the pair, Mulvey noted that it had taken four months to pick the jury that remained hopelessly deadlocked and said: “I find it impossible to believe that an unbiased jury could be selected without superhuman efforts--efforts which this court, the state and these defendants should not be called upon to make or to endure.” He also noted that the defendants had spent two years in jail from the time of their arrest until the jury came back without agreement. Born in New Haven, Conn., Mulvey graduated from Fordham University Law School and commanded a Navy landing craft in the Pacific during World War II. In the 1960s, he won appointment to the state attorney general’s office but eventually left that post to become a Superior Court judge. On Sunday at a nursing home in Hamden, Conn.