Unanimous Decision

With a crowd of excited Negro youths at his back, the off-duty cop held his badge in one hand, his .38-cal. revolver in the other, and advanced toward the doorway to face a Negro boy who was holding a knife. "I'm a police lieutenant," said Thomas R. Gilligan. "Come out and drop it." James Powell, 15, kept the knife chest-high, lunged at Gilligan. The policeman fired a warning shot to the left, into the building. Powell swung the knife. Gilligan blocked the blow with his right hand, but the blade scraped his arm. Powell slashed out again, and Gilligan fired at his raised hand. The bullet went through Powell's arm just above the wrist, lodged in his chest. Powell lunged again, still stabbing with the knife. Gilligan stepped back, fired into Powell's abdomen. The youth fell to the sidewalk and died.

That was New York Police Lieut. Thomas Gilligan's version of an incident last July that exploded into five days of Negro rioting in Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. And last week, after taking 1,600 pages of testimony from 45 witnesses, a New York county grand jury decided that Gilligan's account was essentially correct, ruled that he was not criminally liable for James Powell's death.

The jury's toughest job was to detect the credible in a welter of conflicting testimony. About the only thing most witnesses agreed upon was that the trouble began when the superintendent of an apartment building across the street from Robert F. Wagner Junior High School sprayed a group of summer-school pupils with a hose and that the kids retaliated by throwing garbage-can covers and bottles at him. The superintendent, Patrick Lynch, fled into the building, and Powell followed him. Gilligan, who had just taken a radio to a repair shop in the building, heard the noise, ran out to the sidewalk to see what was going on.

Contradictions. The basic contradictions in testimony lay in the claims of 15 teenagers, most of whom knew Powell, that Powell had not attacked Gilligan with a knife. Most of them said that Powell had fallen to the sidewalk after the first shot. Then, claimed ten of these witnesses, Gilligan fired two shots into Powell when he was down on the sidewalk.

Yet two adult passersby reported that Powell definitely had wielded a knife and described the action much as Gilligan had. Another adult witness said he was sure that Powell had "an object" in his right hand. Two Negro friends of Powell testified that on the way to school, Powell had shown them two knives, given one to each to keep for him. After the superintendent fled into the building, said one friend, Powell asked him for a knife and declared: "I'm going to cut that . . ." The friend pretended that he no longer had the knife. The other youth said that he gave Powell the second knife. Powell walked toward the building, opening and closing the blade, while a girl tried to restrain him. This knife was found near Powell's body.

Police could find no bullet marks in the recently cemented sidewalk to indicate that Gilligan had fired at Powell as he lay prone. One bullet was found in Powell's body, one passed through it, the third lodged in a doorjamb of the building. When one youth was confronted by evidence of this shot, which had taken an upward course, he recanted his testimony that Gilligan had fired at the fallen Powell, admitted that he had not even seen the shooting at all. Other youngsters conceded that a truck and spectators blocked their views.

"It Doesn't Go Down." Inevitably, some Negro leaders termed the grand jury action a "whitewash." Declared James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality: "CORE is astonished that the grand jury, with the compliance of the District Attorney's office, has seen fit to exonerate a 200-lb. police lieutenant in the slaying of a 122-lb. Negro youngster." Said N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins: "An experienced police officer should be able to arrest a 15-year-old boy without killing him. They can explain and explain until they're blue in the face, but they'll never explain why it's necessary for a police officer to shoot a 15-year-old kid. It just doesn't go down."

A police department board is still investigating the case to determine whether Gilligan, a 17-year police veteran with 19 citations for meritorious police work, violated any department regulations. It will be under heavy pressure to find against him. Yet it should go without saying that anyone being attacked with a knife has a right to defend himself--and the grand jury displayed no doubt at all about that. Declared George Schuyler, one of two Negroes serving on the 23-man jury: "Our decision was unanimous. I did the right thing, and so did the rest of the jury."

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