Stop the Trial
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This button refers to the trial of the Chicago 8. Following the turbulent demonstrations and police repression outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, eight antiwar activists – David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party; and two less well-known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines – were indicted by a grand jury indicted on March 20, 1969, and put on trial for conspiracy to cross state lines to cause a riot, teach the making of an incendiary device and commit acts to impede law enforcement officers in their lawful duties. Sixteen alleged co-conspirators - Wolfe B. Lowenthal, Stewart E. Albert, Sidney M. Peck, Kathy Boudin, Corina F. Fales, Benjamin Radford, Thomas W. Neumann, Craig Shimabukuro, Bo Taylor, David A. Baker, Richard Bosciano, Terry Gross, Donna Gripe, Benjamin Ortiz, Joseph Toornabene, and Richard Palmer - avoided prosecution.
The high-profile trial, which began on September 24, 1969, and lasted five months, quickly turned into a circus. The defendants, known initially as the Chicago 8, were represented by radical attorneys, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The judge was Julius Hoffman, and the prosecutors were Richard Schultz and Tom Foran. Bobby Seale repeatedly disrupted the trial because he could not have the lawyer of his choice, calling Judge Hoffman “racist” and a “fascist pig.” In response, Hoffman, who displayed a disdain for the defendants and the anti-war movement, more generally, bound, gagged and chained Seale to his chair in front of the jury for several days. Kunstler lambasted Judge Hoffman’s actions, saying, "This is no longer a court of order, Your Honor, this is a medieval torture chamber." Hoffman ultimately severed Seale’s case from the other seven defendants for a later trial, which never took place. He also sentenced Seale to four years imprisonment for contempt of court, one of the harshest punishments for that offense in U.S. history to that time. A U.S. Court of Appeals quickly overturned the ruling.
The trial of the seven remaining defendants, now known as the Chicago 7, became a cause celebre among New Left activists. The prosecution relied primarily on the testimony of undercover police officers and informants, who told the jury that they had heard various defendants state that they were planning to confront police during the convention and fight back against police aggression. Some claimed to have heard Froines and Weiner speak openly about making stink bombs and other incendiary devices.
According to a history of the case written for the Federal Judicial Center by historian, Bruce Ragsdale, “The defendants and their attorneys went well beyond the rebuttal of the criminal charges and sought to portray the proceedings as a political trial rather than a criminal prosecution. In their legal arguments, in their courtroom behavior, and in their numerous public appearances, they challenged the legitimacy of the court and the judge as well as the substance of the indictment. The trial became for the defense an opportunity to portray the dissent movement that had converged on Chicago for the Democratic Convention.” Defense attorneys called more than 100 witnesses to the stand, including a number of anti-war and countercultural celebrities, like Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Dick Gregory, William Styron, Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe McDonald, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Rev. Jesse Jackson. SDS leader, Tom Hayden, attempted to observe courtroom decorum and offer reasonable arguments to refute the prosecutions claims, but Yippie leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, exploited the trial for political theater, consistently disrupting the proceedings, dressing in costumes, eating jelly beans, blowing kisses at jurors, cracking jokes and insulting the judge. As civil rights attorney, Ron Kuby, recalled at William Kunstler’s 1995 funeral, “While defending the Chicago Seven, [Kunstler] put the war in Vietnam on trial—asking Judy Collins to sing "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" from the witness stand, placing a Viet Cong flag on the defense table, and wearing a black armband to commemorate the war dead.”
Much of the trial turned on procedural arguments that usually went against the defense counsel. Again, Ragsdale explains, “Even before the trial started, Judge Hoffman granted only thirty days for pretrial motions rather than the six months requested by the defense. The judge denied the defense attorneys’ access to government evidence obtained without a warrant and barred the defense from submitting the Lake Villa document in which Hayden and Davis set out their non- violent strategy. Judge Hoffman prohibited former Attorney General Ramsey Clark from testifying about his opposition to prosecution of demonstrators, and Hoffman sharply limited the defense lawyers’ ability to question Mayor Daley. Frequently the trial was interrupted by arguments over seemingly petty questions: Could the defendants distribute birthday cake in the courtroom? Could the defendants use the public restrooms, or should they be limited to the facilities in the holding rooms? Could the musician witnesses sing the songs they performed at demonstrations, or was the judge correct in insisting that they recite lyrics?”
At the end of the chaotic trial, the jury, made up of eleven whites and two African Americans, acquitted all seven defendants of conspiracy, but found Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger, Davis and Hayden guilty of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. Froines and Weiner were acquitted of all charges. Judge Hoffman sentenced the remaining five defendants to the maximum penalty, five years in prison and a $5000 fine All seven defendants were also sentenced to prison time for contempt of court, including their attorney, William Kunstler. In a separate trial, a jury acquitted seven of the eight indicted policemen. The case against the eighth was dropped.
The contempt convictions were ultimately overturned on an appeal in 1972 and in a separate appeal all of the criminal convictions except for Bobby Seale’s were overturned. The appellate court cited the judge’s “deprecatory and often antagonistic attitude toward the defense’ as cause for the reversal. They censured Judge Hoffman and the government attorneys for their open hostility toward the defendants and their failure to fulfill “the standards of our system of justice.”
The legacy of the Chicago 8 trials was less legal than cultural. No clear legal precedents emerged from the cases, particularly with regard to the Anti-Riot Act of 1968, which was the main legal foundation for the prosecutions. Instead, the case has lived on as a cultural touchstone of a turbulent period in American history, adapted numerous times on the stage, in documentary form and as feature films.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
button
Will the Circle be Unbroken: A People’s Guide to Grand Juries and FBI Harassment
Legal and Political Repression
This booklet served as a resource guide for activists and New Left demonstrators in women’s rights, black freedom, and gay liberation movements. While not a substitute for legal aid, this booklet defines possible targets of FBI surveillance such as women’s health clinics, questioning strategies, and definitions for legal terminology.
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1975
pamphlet
Camp News, vol. II, no. 8, September 18, 1971
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Camp News was an underground press periodical "published monthly by men and women working in the Chicago Area Military Project with the help and cooperation of our brothers and sisters in the G.I. movement around the world."
This issue is made up primarily of short updates from military bases and other locations across the country and internationally. It also includes legal news, counseling tips, as well as materials available from the Camp.
Camp News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 18, 1971
underground press
newsletter
National Lawyers Guild
Social Justice, Civil Rights
The National Lawyers Guild was established in 1937 as "an association of progressive lawyers and jurists who believed that they had a major role to play in the reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property rights." The Guild, which continues its work today, is considered "the oldest and most extensive network of public interest and human rights activists working within the legal system."
According to the NLG website, "In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the civil rights movement long before the federal government or other bar associations were involved. Guild members represented the families of murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, who had heeded the Guild’s call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by local law enforcement/Ku Klux Klan members. Lawsuits initiated by the National Lawyers Guild brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the civil rights struggle in Mississippi and challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Guild lawyers defended thousands of civil rights activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights and established new federal constitutional protections in ground-breaking Supreme Court cases such as Dombrowski v. Pfister, which enjoined thousands of racially motivated state court criminal prosecutions; Goldberg v. Kelly, the case that established the concept of “entitlements” to social benefits that require Due Process protections; and Monell v. Department of Social Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police officers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, and the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Guild offices in Asia represented GIs who opposed the war. Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that established that Nixon could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name of “national security” and led to the Watergate hearings and his eventual resignation. Guild members defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party (including Angela Davis), the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement and helped expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance, infiltration, and disruption tactics that the U.S. Senate Church Commission detailed in the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings and that led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other specific limitations on federal investigative power."
The button reads, “…more dangerous than those… who throw the bombs.”
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
Button
Physical Object
"Stop the Grand Jury!!!!"
Legal Reform Movement
This pamphlet criticizes expanded grand jury powers and the way they are used against political activists. In part it argues:
"THE INTERNAL SECURITY DIVISION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOW TRYING TO LAY DOWN A WIDE FOUNDATION FOR INDICTMENT AND PROSECUTION OF MANY INTER-RELATED POLITICAL 'CRIMES' AND CONSPIRACY CHARGES. IT IS CREATING A WHOLE NEW PATTERN OF REPRESSION, INTIMIDATION AND FEAR. THIS PATTERN CAN BE USED SELECTIVELY FOR THE TIME BEING BUT IT OFFERS VERY SWEEPING POLICE STATE POWERS FOR THE GOVERNMENT'S FUTURE USE."
Bay Area Committee to Stop the Grand Jury
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s or early-1970s
mimeograph
leaflet
Lawyers Against Apartheid
Anti-Apartheid Movement
Between the years 1986 and 1996, the London-based legal group, Lawyers Against Apartheid served as a legal counseling and aid service for anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, contesting the state legal system’s rulings. Comprised of legal scholars, lawyers, and student activists, the group also notably advocated for the revision of Prisoner of War status to include political prisoners and activists.
Lawyers Against Apartheid
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1986
Button
Physical Object
Roslyn Payne for Assistant Judge
Electoral Politics
Over the years, since moving to Vermont, Roz Payne has run for, and occasionally been elected to, a local public office or authority, like the time she became sheriff, but that is a whole other story...
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
Button
Physical Object
End Grand Jury Abuse!
Legal Reform Movement
The National Lawyers Guild served as a leading organization targeting the abuse of grand juries, particularly in cases involving the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots which led to numerous contempt charges.
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown
Button
Physical Object
ca. 1960s and 1970s