Biography
Warren William Wells was a captain and sergeant-at-arms of the Black Panther Party who was wounded in the April 6, 1968 West Oakland gun battle in which the police killed 17-year-old Bobby Hutton and wounded Eldridge Cleaver. Indicted with seven co-defendants on attempted-murder and assault charges, Wells was tried separately; after two trials ended in hung juries, a third found him guilty of assault with a deadly weapon while acquitting him of attempted murder, and he was given an indeterminate term of 1 to 15 years. The conviction was later reversed on appeal over the composition of the Alameda County grand jury (In re Wells, 1971). He became a leader of the California prison movement and a co-author of the 1970 Folsom Manifesto, and died in 2001. (Not to be confused with the NFL player of the same name.)
The Oakland prosecution report contrasted the pending Wade, Scott, Langford and Cotton trial with earlier proceedings involving Charles Bursey and Warren Wells and a separate trial for David Hilliard. Its descriptions are the newspaper’s account and do not supply new individual custody endpoints. The Black Panther, February 13, 1971, original PDF page 9. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/06%20no%203%201-20%20feb%2013%201971.pdf#page=9
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The July 1975 directory lists Wells at Soledad Prison under historical California prisoner number B23864. This records a historical location and identifier, not a federal BOP number or proof of present custody.
In an open letter printed November 8, 1969, Warren William Wells described repeated trials after the April 6, 1968 confrontation and approximately ten years of confinement during his first twenty-two years. He specifically requested credit for the year spent in an isolated jail cell from the preceding September through October. These are self-reported historical components, not a complete lifetime custody total or proof of the entry and exit dates of the existing April 1968 case.
The August 23, 1969 Black Panther reported that Wells had recently been released on bail before his third trial, scheduled for August 18. Supporters borrowed the $620 cash premium for his bail. The article does not supply the exact bail release date; its custody-duration statements conflict with the same issue's fifteen-month description and should not be used as a numerical counter.
The October 1969 newspaper characterized Wells’s recent conviction as attempted murder and the sentence as five years to life, after two hung juries reported as ten-to-two and eleven-to-one for acquittal. That contemporary characterization conflicts with the separately documented assault conviction and one-to-fifteen-year term in the existing profile; it is preserved as a source discrepancy and does not replace those case fields.
