“I redoubled my effort to review events of that kind,” Epps says. “I didn’t understand why one would go to the Combat Zone, but it had been a practice for some time.”

Weisman says the College had no need to increase its oversight.

“Frankly, the mere fact that it happened seemed to have enough of a chilling effect,” Weisman says.

Naturally, the incident was particularly tough on the football team.

“You couldn’t have blown the balloon up bigger and then burst it,” says Alphonse Ippolito `79. “There was a lot of denial. People felt bad about the tradition.”

The Trial

Easterling, Soares and Allen—all of whom were black—were brought to court on murder charges. Epps says racial tensions ran high.

“The trial came at a time when the city was in a state of high racial conflict,” Epps says. “It symbolized the racial conflict.”

Several Harvard students and Epps testified in the trial and, in March of 1977, Easterling, Soares, and Allen were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The verdicts, however, would not hold.

Lawyers for the three appealed the convictions, arguing that the prosecution had violated the Commonwealth constitution by using its priviledge of preemptory challenge to prevent men and women from serving on the jury solely on the basis of race.

The prosecutor had rejected 12 of 13, or 92 percent, of the black jurors whom the trial judge found fit to serve. By contrast, he eliminated only 34 percent of white jurors on challenges.

In 1979, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court granted the three defendants a new trial, a decision that was eventually upheld by the United States Supreme Court.