Biography
Mark Lane was a New York State Assemblyman who joined the 1961 Freedom Rides and was arrested on an integrated bus ride and jailed in Jackson, Mississippi. He was sentenced to four months (two suspended) and a $200 fine for 'breach of the peace,' and appealed.
Lane went on to become one of the most prominent critics of the Warren Commission: his 1966 best-seller Rush to Judgment was the first major book challenging the official account of the Kennedy assassination. A lawyer to the end of his life, he later represented James Earl Ray before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, was in Jonestown as an attorney for the Peoples Temple when the 1978 massacre began and escaped into the jungle, and continued writing and litigating civil-rights cases until his death in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2016.
Additional reported jailing during the Wounded Knee defense
The October 1974 Highway 13, printed page 6 (PDF page 7), reports that defense attorney Mark Lane was jailed by Judge Nichol during the Wounded Knee prosecution after objecting to the judge’s treatment of the defense. The article identifies his work with the Covered Wagon GI center at Mountain Home Air Force Base. This is a separately reported episode from Lane’s 1961 Freedom Ride confinement. The source does not print the jailing or discharge day, its duration, an imposed term, or a formal statutory charge; no such details are inferred. The same article reports dismissal of the Wounded Knee felony charges against Dennis Banks and Russell Means for government misconduct. That case disposition is not Lane’s physical-release date.
Highway 13, October 1974, Volume 3, Number 1, original PDF page 7.
Deputy clerk Robert Lilly’s sworn October 26, 1964 affidavit reports the following Hinds County Court disposition: County Court docket 12,723: motion for a directed verdict sustained, March 30, 1962. This is the legal disposition of the Freedom Ride prosecution, not evidence that physical custody continued until that date or that a jail release occurred then. Earlier municipal convictions, where already documented, are preserved as earlier events.
The Minnesota Leader’s December 1974 review reports that Lane and William Kunstler spent an overnight in jail during the Wounded Knee defense in late August 1974. Earlier brief contempt detentions are separately described; no measured total is inferred.
