onventional morality and perform illegal acts. In such cases, the delinquent will often argue that his behavior was a form of self-help or self-defense. In other words, the delinquent has performed a form of private justice as a means of social control. On the surface, the doctrines espoused by the Black Panther Party may seem to indicate that its members did not view their violent confrontational behavior as wrong. However, a deeper analysis reveals that such may have been the case, although they also were convinced of their justification for the "wrong" behavior.
Because the law is concerned with the criminal intent involved in any given act, criminals will often attempt to neutralize the criminality of their actions by arguing that they were not responsible for the act. The criminal may deny responsibility by blaming social, cultural and environmental factors that prevented him from forming the requisite criminal intent or, in the alternative, crippled his ability to act in any other way, for example "road rage" or "black rage." Consider, for example, Huey Newton's killing of Oakland police officer John Frey in 1967.
Hugh Pearson notes that the Oakland police were notoriously racist. In 1966, the year in which Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Oakland police force had only 19 black officers out of a total of over 600 officers. Pearson notes this number amounted to only 3 percent of the force in a city that was about 25 percent black. In addition, many Oakland officers were openly contemptuous of the city's black poor, and Frey had developed a reputation for being among the most brutal and racist of Oakland's police officers.
Officers Frey and Heanes stopped Newton and Gene McKinney in their car only days after Bloody Tuesday, a day on which Oakland police and antiwar demonstrators clashed violently. While the story of what exactly happened before Newton shot and killed Frey a...