Trial of Seale and Huggins Begins; Defense and State Question Jurors

The murder trial of Black Panther National Chairman Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins opened yesterday in New Haven with jury selection, but no jurors were impaneled.

Seale and Huggins are charged in the May 1969 death of New York City Panther Alex Rackley, who the prosecution claims was murdered because he was a suspected police informer.

Seale is currently appealing a four-year sentence for contempt of court during the trial of the Chicago Eight.

Twelve other Panthers have also been charged in the case. One, Lonnie McLucas, was convicted last August 31 of conspiring to murder Rackley and was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.

Prosecuting and defense attorneys questioned three prospective jurors yesterday out of a jury panel of 50. Last week a challenge by defense attorneys Charles R. Garry and Catherine Roraback to the make-up of the panel was refused by Judge Harold M. Mulvey.

The defense charged that jurors in New Haven County tended to be white, middle-aged, and middle-class, and therefore not peers of Seale and Huggins. Only one of 50 on the jury panel is black.

In other developments Mulvey turned down two motions by Garry, one requesting that the jury be sequestered and another asking that news artists be allowed to make sketches of the trial, as photographers are traditionally barred from any courtroom.

Garry's request apparently came in response to the bailiffs' confiscation of sketches made by a CBS artist of spectators waiting to enter the courtroom.

Yesterday's spectators, most of them young and black, numbered about 25. They were searched as they entered the courtroom, and they remained generally quiet during the proceedings. At one point, Seale raised his hand to quiet a murmur which arose in the audience in response to a statement by one member of the jury panel.