New York, April 24 (RHC)-- In New York, former Black Panther Herman Bell is poised to leave prison for the first time in nearly 45 years, after a judge rejected a lawsuit challenging his upcoming release on parole. 

Herman Bell was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the killing of two New York City police officers in 1971.  At the time, he was a member of the Black Liberation Army and a former Black Panther. 

After his imprisonment, he has mentored thousands of young men while behind bars and kept a clean disciplinary record. 

Over the many years Herman Bell spent in U.S. prisons, he became intimate comrades with Puerto Rican Nationalist fighter Rafael Cancel-Miranda as well as the Cuban Five, at the time they were imprisoned in the jails of the Empire.