Biography
Earl Gibson was serving a five-years-to-life first-degree-burglary sentence in California beginning in 1965 and became active in prisoner organizing. Prison officials placed Gibson in the San Quentin Adjustment Center after charging him on July 21, 1971 with assaulting an informant and murdering guard Leo Davis. An all-white Marin County jury convicted Gibson and Larry Justice of murder and assault on April 18, 1973. Gibson was then transferred to segregation at Folsom Prison. His custody began before the political prosecution, and the reviewed sources do not establish his final release date.
Contemporary prison-support account and limits
The Anvil’s eyewitness account explicitly dates a San Rafael trial visit to April 3, 1973 and names Earl Gibson with his co-defendant Larry Justice. It describes both as twenty-eight and already confined in San Quentin’s Adjustment Center since July 1971, while distinguishing Larry’s earlier imprisonment beginning in 1967 from Earl’s beginning in 1965. This independently confirms custody and a trial-day observation, not a new admission or release. The article describes a pending verdict and advocates acquittal; that prediction is not recorded as an actual acquittal and does not replace the later April 18 conviction already in this profile. The reported age is retained as source context, not converted into an exact birth date. The cover names Earl Gibson and Larry Justice together on a two-person illustration but does not explicitly map each name to a separate face, so no individual portrait crop is guessed.
The Anvil, United Prisoners Union, volume 1 number 1, April cover; original pages 1, 3, 8.
In a first-person letter published in September 1971, Gibson said he was removed from the San Quentin prison hospital while being treated for an injured back and placed in the Adjustment Center. Gibson and his co-defendant described beatings, forced blood draws, stopped mail and prolonged isolation, and attributed the new charges to their efforts to expose prison conditions. These are the prisoners' allegations.
Muhammad Speaks, September10,1971 (available first32pages), PDF page 3.
