Catherine Masud’s 84-minute documentary, A Double Life, chronicles the journey of Stephen Bingham, the radical attorney accused of passing a gun to incarcerated Black Panther Party member George Jackson that allegedly triggered a shootout at San Quentin State Prison in 1971 and ended in Jackson’s death along with the deaths of five others. Jackson was serving what he called the longest prison sentence ever in California history for stealing $70 from a gas station. The film also examines legendary Black revolutionary icons including author, academic and activist Angela Davis, who was involved with the George Jackson Defense Committee and met George Jackson in prison.

After the August 21, 1971, bloodbath at San Quentin, fearing for his life, Bingham went underground and fled to Europe, where he assumed a false identity and lived using a pseudonym for 13 years. Bingham voluntarily returned to the U.S. on July 9, 1984, to stand trial on two counts of murder and one of conspiracy. On June 28, 1986, a Marin County jury unanimously acquitted Bingham of all charges.

In this exclusive interview with Truthout, Stephen Bingham discusses his role in Jackson’s case, his time living underground in Europe and his own filmmaking experience. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Ed Rampell: What was your relationship with George Jackson and what happened at San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971?

Stephen Bingham: George was interested in filing a civil suit about prison conditions in San Quentin’s euphemistically named “Adjustment Center,” where prisoners were held 23-and-a-half hours a day [in solitary confinement]. My early visits with George were to talk about these conditions. On August 21, 1971, I was requested to accompany Vanita Anderson [an investigator in the Soledad Brothers murder trial in which George Jackson and two other prisoners were charged with murdering a prison guard at Soledad Prison in 1970], to San Quentin to ensure she could visit with George to go over the final galleys of his second book, Blood in My Eye. The authorities had been clamping down on George’s incredible number of visitors. Sure enough… her visit was denied.

She asked if I could take in the materials for him to review, and I agreed to do that. As I was going in with the papers to the attorney’s visiting room off the main visiting room, the guard asked me, “Aren’t you going to take the tape recorder?” I had no need to, so Vanita said I could take the tape recorder.

That’s a key piece of evidence, of course, as the authorities’ whole theory of what happened [the ensuing shootout] is that a gun was inside that tape recorder. There was also a wig, and I had carried all that in to be used by Jackson for some kind of escape attempt. Which of course is nonsense, given the high wall, and the Adjustment Center is a maximum-security prison within a maximum-security prison. So, escaping from San Quentin then and now is virtually impossible. But that was their theory.

I took the papers in, George made some notes, I brought them out and gave them to Vanita and went to have a late lunch with my uncle. I got home around 10:30 and the San Quentin shootout was all over the news. About 20 lawyer friends were waiting for me to arrive, because the National Lawyers Guild was targeted by the FBI; the consensus was I had to immediately disappear.

How’d you get away?

I went to a nearby house hoping the........

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