Tom Manning (prisoner)

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Born to a Boston postal clerk, Tom Manning is known for killing a police officer during a routine traffic stop, and for his involvement with leftist militants who bombed a series of US military and commercial institutes in the 1970s and early 1980s.

As a youth, he shined shoes and raised pigeons, before finding work as a stockboy. He joined the US Military in 1963, and the following year was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba before being transferred off to spend the following year in the Vietnam War. Some time shortly after 1965, he was sentenced to five years in prison for armed robbery and assault, serving the last ten months in Massachusetts Correctional Institution - Cedar Junction. He claims it was during these years that he became heavily politicized, through his interactions with other prisoners^[1]

After his release in 1971, he married Carol and together they produced three children, Jeremy, Tamara, and Jonathan.

Together with his arrest for the bombings, Manning was also convicted for his role in killing New Jersey police officer Philip Lamonaco during a traffic stop on December 21 1981. The killings launched the largest manhunt in NJ police history^[2], and ended with the arrests of Raymond Levasseur, Patricia Gross, Richard Williams, Jaan Laaman, and Barbara Curzi on November 4th 1984, and Manning and his wife Carol on April 24, 1985. All of them were associated with the United Freedom Front.

He pled self-defence at trial, while defence counsel showed that Lamonaco had emptied his entire .357 Magnum clip at Manning and his associates.^[3] He was sentenced on February 19, 1987.

In September 2006, the University of Southern Maine removed his art from an art presentation, and apologised for allowing him to be heralded as a "political prisoner" by event organizers.^[4]