Stephen Mitchell Bingham (born April 23, 1942) is an American legal services and civil rights attorney who was tried and acquitted in 1986 for his alleged role in Black Panther George Jackson's attempted escape fifteen years earlier from San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California, in 1971. Early life and education Stephen Bingham, the son of Alfred Mitchell Bingham and Sylvia Doughty Knox Bingham, was raised in Salem, Connecticut where he grew up among the state's wealthy class. His father was an author, attorney, and activist who was elected to the Connecticut State Senate as a New Deal Democrat in 1940 and served one term; he was also the editor and a founder of the left-leaning Common Sense. His grandfather, Hiram Bingham III was a governor and a U.S. Senator from Connecticut as well as the discoverer of the Machu Picchu ruins in Peru. Bingham graduated from Milton Academy in 1960, where he was captain of the track team. He attended Yale University, where he participated on the freshman track and the varsity cross country teams. Bingham became involved in politics during his sophomore year, and was reportedly influenced by Allard Lowenstein. He was a member of the Yale Young Democrats and the Student Advisor Board, as well as the executive editor of the Yale Daily News. In 1964, he graduated from Yale with honors, and spent two months in Mileston, Mississippi as a volunteer in the Freedom Summer civil rights project. Bingham decided to pursue a career in law and attended the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. During his first year, after a six-month relationship, he married Gretchen Spreckels, the granddaughter of Adolph B. Spreckels and whose family founded the Spreckels Sugar Company. The couple joined the Peace Corps and were assigned to Sierra Leone. After spending two years in West Africa with the Peace Corps, they returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1967 where Bingham resumed the study of law. In 1969, he received a J.D. degree from Berkeley. He was admitted to the California bar in January 1970. The couple divorced in May, 1969. He marched for Cesar Chavez as well as with the Congress of Racial Equality in Mississippi, he was an intern in the United States Congress and the United States Department of Justice, and he worked for Berkeley Neighborhood Legal Services. Bingham worked as part of a San Francisco Bay