In 1969, 21 members of the New York Black Panther Party were arrested in predawn raids and charged with a combined 156 counts of conspiracy. To prove the defendants’ dangerous ideology to the jury, prosecutors screened The Battle of Algiers and read aloud from Mao’s Little Red Book. Among the defendants was 23-year-old Afeni Shakur, who had no attorney and no legal training and chose to represent herself. She was eight months pregnant, facing a 350-year sentence for a conspiracy the prosecution’s own witnesses couldn’t describe (on the stand, one of the state’s key officers admitted that he’d never seen her hurt anyone or blow anything up). In its quest for a conviction, the government leaned on the so-called “conspiracy doctrine,” which requires only agreement with the idea of an action, not action itself. In other words, you don’t need to prove anyone did anything, only that they talked about doing it, or associated with people who did.

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