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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 27, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Norma Jean Croy free

Native woman released 19 years after frame-up

By Luis Talamantez and Gloria La Riva in San Francisco

Norma Jean Croy, California's best known Indigenous woman political prisoner, was released Feb. 7 from Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla, where she had been serving a life sentence.

Croy, a Shasta Indian, was tried and convicted in 1979 after a highly charged trial in Siskiyou County with her brother, Patrick Hooty Croy, and several cousins, all Indian youths. She was charged with being an accomplice in the death of a police officer.

Their story began in 1978, when they entered a convenience store in Yreka, Siskiyou County, in northern California. The store clerk, known for hating Indians, ran out to the parking lot where there were several cops.

He said the youths had stolen beer and assaulted him, and urged the police to "go get 'em."

A car chase ensued with 27 police giving pursuit. The youths sought refuge at their grandmother's cabin in an area known as Rocky Gulch.

As they ran up a hill to the cabin, the unarmed Norma Jean Croy was shot in the back.

During a police siege that night, Yreka police officer Bo Hittson shot Patrick Hooty Croy in the back while circling behind the cabin where he was tending to his wounded sister. Croy turned and fired one shot from a .22-caliber rifle that struck and killed Hittson.

An all-white jury sentenced Hooty Croy to die. The state supreme court, at that time under Chief Judge Rose Bird, ordered a new trial. Bird and several other supreme court justices considered sympathetic to the defendants were shortly thereafter booted off the court in a recall sponsored by law-enforcement groups.

Hooty Croy was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

In a brilliant 1989 retrial with noted San Francisco defense attorney Tony Serra, Hooty Croy was acquitted. It was proven that he had killed Hittson in self-defense.

Serra also used a cultural defense, showing that the white population in Siskiyou County has been notoriously racist against Native American people.

Hooty Croy had spent 12 years on San Quentin's death row up to that time.

Long legal battle

Despite the reversal of her brother's murder conviction, Norma Jean Croy continued to serve a life sentence for a non-existent crime. Time and again, the California Department of Corrections vehemently refused to recognize her innocence. More time was added to her sentence and she was denied parole.

Finally, Federal Magistrate J.F. Moulds, a recent critic of California's prison system, overturned her conviction and ordered a retrial on the grounds of constitutional violations in her original trial and lack of adequate counsel. The attorney general's office and Siskiyou County prosecutors declined to try her again, knowing a conviction would be unlikely.

U.S. Chief Judge Lawrence Karlton of the District Court in Sacramento then signed for Croy's release from the California prison system.

Croy was met by her attorneys and close friends at the prison gates. After 19 years in prison, at the age of 43, she had finally won her freedom thanks to the struggle waged by so many supporters.

As a lesbian, she was backed by many in the Bay-area lesbian community, who organized events on her behalf during her incarceration. The vigorous efforts of volunteer attorneys Diana Samuelson and Jim Thompson won her conviction reversal.

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