G. Flint Taylor (born April 16, 1946) is an American human rights and civil rights attorney based in Chicago, Illinois, who has litigated many high-profile police brutality, government misconduct and death penalty cases. Taylor has pursued public interest law to take on allegations of corrupt police tactics and wrongful convictions in the city of Chicago and elsewhere. Taylor was part of a team of negotiators in the 2015 landmark decision by the City of Chicago to award reparations to the survivors of police torture, becoming the first municipal government to do so.
Early life and family
George Flint Taylor Jr. was born in Farmington, Maine, and was named after his paternal great-grandfather George Flint, a Maine state senator. Taylor's father was a direct descendant of several English Pilgrims who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Mayflower in 1620. Taylor graduated from Westborough (MA) High School, where he won ten varsity letters in basketball, football, and baseball. He graduated from Brown University with an American History degree in 1968, and from the Northwestern University School of Law in 1972.
Career
During his second year in law school at Northwestern, Taylor began to work with a group of lawyers who were representing counterculture political groups, including the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords Organization, Rising Up Angry and the Weathermen. In August 1969, these lawyers, together with two other law students, established the People's Law Office (PLO) on the north side of Chicago.
Fred Hampton Black Panther case
One of Taylor's most notable cases involved litigation over the death of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, killed in what was reported by police as a shootout at his apartment. Taylor and his colleagues at the People's Law Office filed a civil rights suit following a raid on December 4, 1969, conducted by fourteen Chicago police officers, at the direction of Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan. The officers entered an apartment on Chicago's West Side, shooting and killing Hampton and Black Panther activist Mark Clark, and wounding four others. Taylor, together with several other People's Law Office lawyers and staff, were called to the apartment by survivors. For the next ten days they collected evidence at the scene.
This evidence was ultimately turned over to FBI ballistics expert Robert Zimmers, who determined that of the more than 90 bullets fired, all but one were fired by the police. Thousands of Chicago citizens toured the apartment while the evidence was being taken. One older black woman observed that it "wasn't nothing but a Northern lynching."
In 1970, Taylor and his colleagues sued a wide range of police and prosecutorial officials for $47.7 million in damages on behalf of the families of Hampton, Clark, and the survivors of the police raid. Upon discovering that the FBI also was involved in the raid, under J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program, they later named several FBI officials as defendants. Taylor worked in cooperation with U. S. Senator Frank Church's (D-Idaho) Committee on Intelligence. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations concluded in its 1976 report that the BPP raid by the Chicago police was part of a nationwide FBI program called COINTELPRO that was designed to "destroy" the Black Panther movement.
In January 1976, the BPP civil lawsuits went to trial with Taylor and law partner Jeffrey Haas as trial counsel. The trial lasted for 18 months, longer than any previous federal court case. During the trial, it was established that the FBI had not turned over 200 volumes of Black Panther documents to defense counsel. Both Taylor and Haas were jailed for contempt when they protested what they claimed were unfair rulings by federal Judge Joseph Sam Perry. At the end of the trial, Judge Perry dismissed the case. Taylor, Haas and colleague Dennis Cunningham appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
In April 1979, the Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, overturned the dismissal, holding that the evidence introduced at trial supported the allegations of a conspiracy among the Chicago police, the Cook County State's Attorney, and the FBI against the Black Panther members. The appeals court further ruled that the government should be sanctioned for suppression of the FBI documents and that Taylor and Haas were wrongfully cited for contempt. In 1982, the case was settled for $1.85 million. It was never determined who fired the first shot at the apartment.