Question: What American political activist, academic, and author was represented by Leo Branton in her 1972 murder trial?
Context: Luigi Calabresi (Rome, 14 November 1937 – Milan, 17 May 1972), was a police officer and Italian State Police official in Milan, Italy.  His 1972 murder triggered a wave of political violence. The New Alliance Party (NAP) was an American political party formed in New York City in 1979.  Its immediate precursor was an umbrella organization known as the Labor Community Alliance for Change, whose member groups included the coalition of Grass Roots Women and the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council.  All of these groups were associated with controversial psychologist and political activist Fred Newman, whose radical health care collective Centers for Change and Marxist International Workers Party were active in grassroots politics in New York City.  The NAP's first chairperson was then-South Bronx City Councilman Gilberto Gerena-Valentin, a veteran Puerto Rican political activist.  .  The party is notable for getting African American psychologist Lenora Fulani on the ballot in all 50 states during her first Presidential campaign in 1988, making her both the first African-American and woman to do so. Helga Zepp-LaRouche (born August 25, 1948, Trier) is a German political activist, wife of American political activist Lyndon LaRouche, and founder of the LaRouche movement's Schiller Institute and the German "Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität" party ("BüSo") (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity). State of Texas v. Yolanda Saldívar was a criminal trial held at the Harris County Courthouse in Houston, Texas.  The trial began with the jury's swearing-in on October 9, through opening statements on October 12, to a verdict on October 23, 1995.  Former nurse Yolanda Saldívar was tried on one count of first-degree murder after the shooting death of American Tejano music singer Selena on March 31, 1995, after which she held police and the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit at bay for almost ten hours.  The case has been described as the most important trial for the Latino population and was compared to the O. J. Simpson murder trial by media outlets.  It was one of the most publicly followed trials in the history of the state of Texas. Thomas Cullen Davis (born September 22, 1933, Fort Worth, Texas) is an American oil heir and member of a prominent Fort Worth, Texas oil family.  Davis is best known for standing trial, and being acquitted, twice in the 1970s, first for the murders of two people at the home of his estranged wife Priscilla on August 2, 1976 and the second two years later for conspiring to murder the judge in his divorce proceedings against Priscilla.  At the time of his first trial, Davis was the wealthiest man to have stood trial for murder in the United States.  The prosecution alleged in his murder trial that he forced his 12-year-old step-daughter Andrea Wilborn into the basement of Davis' Stonegate Mansion, making her kneel before shooting her dead, and also shot Priscilla's live-in boyfriend Stan Farr, a former basketball star at nearby Texas Christian University.  A Texas jury found him not guilty of the murders.  The girl was the daughter of his second wife, whom he was in the process of divorcing. Murray Dry is an American political scientist specializing in American constitutional law, American political thought, political philosophy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, federalism, separation of powers, and the American founding.  He is perhaps most noted for having helped to compile "The Complete Anti-Federalist" with his former teacher Herbert Storing.  He is currently the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College, having earned his BA, MA, and Ph.D at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Storing and Leo Strauss, among others.  For the 2009-2010 academic year, he was a Visiting Professor at Yeshiva University.  His current area of research is in the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, and he is working on a book on that subject. Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, academic, and author.  She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Roméo Phillion (April 29, 1939 – November 2, 2015) was convicted of the 1967 murder of Ottawa firefighter Léopold Roy, after making a confession to police which he recanted two hours later.  He spent 31 years in prison and five years on parole.  The case was reopened in 2006, and in March 2009, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned his 1972 murder conviction and granted him a new trial, in part because a 1968 police report establishing a clear alibi for Phillion had not been turned over to his defence lawyer in his original trial.  He was assisted by the Innocence Project and by lawyer James Lockyer, a director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.  On 29 April 2010, crown prosecutors withdrew the murder charge against him. Thomas Jefferson Hubbard (1806 – April 24, 1877) was an Oregon pioneer and politician who was acquitted of murder charges in the first American murder trial in what is now the state of Oregon.  At the trial the murder was determined to be justifiable homicide. Leo Branton Jr. (February 17, 1922 – April 19, 2013) was an American trial lawyer.  He attended Tennessee State University and earned his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law in 1948.  He served in the Army during World War II.  Branton represented Nat King Cole in a label dispute, and Jimi Hendrix's estate, among others.  He was well known for representing Angela Davis during her 1972 murder trial and subsequent acquittal.
Answer: Angela Davis