Charles R. Garry

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Charles R. Garry was a prominent civil rights attorney who represented several high-profile political cases during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, he was retained by the Black Panther Party to defend Huey P. Newton in the 1967 slaying of Oakland Police Officer John Frey. Subsequently, he defended Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale. In 1969, he defended the Oakland 7 - a group of San Francisco Bay Area anti-Vietnam War activists who were involved in the planning of the 1967 "Stop the Draft Week."

After the turbulent era of the 1960s came to an end and with the demise of the anti-war and Black Power movements, Garry took on a new set of clients. During the second half of the 1970s, he was asked to serve as the attorney to the Peoples Temple. Shortly after, he narrowly escaped death in November 1978 when over 900 followers of the reverend Jim Jones committed mass suicide-and-murder at Jonestown in Guyana.

He died in October 1991 of a stroke at the age of 82.

Charles Garry's life is chronicled in the recent feature length documentary "The People's Advocate: The Life & Times of Charles R. Garry."

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