IT IS going on four months since Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins went on trial for their lives in New Haven. You don't read much about the case in the papers any more, and most days not many people show up to observe the trial.

In fact, all you are likely to see in the papers is articles like this one, telling you how everyone has stopped caring and reporting. And on a typical day last week, no one who showed up to witness what John Froines last spring called the "focus of the whole country" was turned away, despite very limited seating in Judge Harold Mulvey's Court of Common Pleas.

Last spring, when 15,000 people showed up in New Haven to demand that Seale and Huggins be freed, was truly the heyday of the Panthers and their white radical supporters. Since then, for a variety of reasons, things have gone downhill-perhaps for good.

After two years of constant police harassment-legal and otherwise-have decimated its leadership, the Black Panther Party seems in city after city to have fallen into disarray.

Huey P. Newton, who founded the Party with Seale in 1966, is out of jail now-free on bail pending appeal of his manslaughter conviction. Although during his imprisonment the Panthers virtually canonized him, and expected him to revitalize the Party, Newton has not proved the vital leader the Party needs.

While Newton was in jail, Seale waged a national campaign to mobilize support for him, and he thus claims responsibility for the fact that Newton was not convicted of first-degree murder-the original charge against him in the 1968 slaying of a California policeman. Now when Newton is free and Seale is on trial, the latest news of Newton in the white press is that he is living in a $700 a month San Francisco apartment, in a "high-security" building.

While popular support for the Panthers as a whole has waned-perhaps because there has been less and less to support-support for Seale, Huggins, and other New Haven Panthers arrested for the 1969 kidnapping-torture-murder of Alex Rackley also seems passe.

It is hard to say whether this is due to the general decline of radical political activity, or to a disillusionment with the Panthers, or perhaps to a growing suspicion that Seale and Huggins may not be innocent. They are charged with conspiracy to kidnap and murder Rackley. Seale is also charged with flight to avoid prosecution.

The 15,000 who converged on New Haven last May loudly denounced the police contention that Bobby Seale as Panther chairman had ordered Rackey, a member of the New York Chapter, executed as a police informer. Also, these white supporters felt, like Yale's President Kingman Brewster, that it was impossible for a black revolutionary to get a fair trial anywhere in America.

However, the months since May Day have seen another New Haven Panther, Lonnie McLucas, receive what seemed to be a fair trial, at least by the standards of normal criminal justice. McLucas was convicted on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 15 years-largely on the testimony of George Sams, Loretta Luckas, and Warren Kimbro, other Panthers who had been indicted in the crime and then turned state's evidence.

McLucas' lawyer has readily admitted that the verdict, and the sentence, were mere compromises, and he has referred to his client rather derisively as "malleable," and a "schnoop." Throughout the trial the defense played down the political aspects of the case and symbolically McLucas dressed constantly in a coat and tie.

The picture sticks in the popular mind of an orderly and conclusive judicial procedure. The McLucas trial has helped defuse mass support for Seale and Huggins. It will also affect the outcome of their case in more direct ways.

A SIGNIFICANT but little-noticed fact is that the McLucas trial did not establish the credibility of George Sams, the key prosecution witness in Seale's case. Sams alone testifies that Seale ordered Rackley's death. Kimbro, Luckes, and McLucas all denied this on the stand at McLucas' trial.

The Panthers claim that Sams is a police agent who engineered the murder of Alex Rackley, a Party member in good standing, in order to destroy the New Haven Chapter. The prosecution admits that it was Sams who actually commanded Kimbro and McLucas to abduct and shoot Rackley-allegedly on orders from "headquarters."

Sams' credibility is further undermined by his history of mental instability and defectiveness, and by his alternately violent and laughable career as a Party member. Several times Sams was saved from expulsion only by the intervention of Stokely Carmichael, the Partys one-time Minister of Foreign Affairs for whom he had been a bodyguard.