Verdict on the Chicago Seven: From Court to Country

AGAIN, Chicago. Again, a deeply symbolic conflict, an emotional and ideological division in the country. After the 1968 Democratic Convention, Americans were divided between those who backed the police against what seemed to them the outrageous and obscene attacks of young rioters, and those who felt that the demonstrators had been brutalized by Mayor Richard Daley's cops. This time, Americans were divided between those who saw Federal Judge Julius Hoffman as upholding the American judicial system and the sanctity of the courts against outrageous, sometimes filthy attacks by the Chicago Seven; and those who thought that, however impossible their behavior, the defendants were being victimized by a bad law and a biased judge. From all possible indications, the vast majority backed the cops then, and back Hoffman now. Without question, the Seven did indeed deliberately and dangerously assault the System--a System that, for all its faults, does protect dissenters and minorities. But the issue could not and did not end there.

As the trial closed, Vice President Spiro Agnew gave voice to what many feel when he denounced the Chicago defendants as "anarchists and social misfits" during a speech at a Republican fund-raising dinner in St. Paul. "Fortunately for America," said Agnew, "the system proved equal to the challenge. That jury came in with an American result." New York's Mayor John Lindsay was of a different mind. "All of us, I think, see in that trial a tawdry parody of our judicial system," he said. "When a trial becomes fundamentally an examination of political acts and beliefs, then guilt or innocence becomes almost irrelevant." Protests, many of them violent, broke out against the Chicago convictions in cities and on campuses around the land. The trial was not only a symptom of the division in America; it also deepened it.

The five months of testimony and argument had barely come to an end, with the jury dispatched to ponder its verdict, when Judge Hoffman began handing out contempt-of-court sentences that ranged from two months and 18 days for Lee Weiner to 29 months and 16 days for David Dellinger. With characteristic, outrageous hyperbole, Dellinger protested: the System "wants us to be like good Jews and just go quietly to the gas chambers." At that point, his daughter Natasha, who had been with her sister Michelle at the trial, clapped her hands twice, and a kicking, punching melee ensued between two U.S. marshals and the defendants, their friends and relatives.

Incredible Statement. Chief Defense Attorney William Kunstler, reduced to tears of resentment and frustration, pleaded with the judge: "Take me next. Let me be next." Kunstler got four years and 13 days for contempt; his associate, Leonard Weinglass, was sentenced to 20 months and five days. Hoffman told them: "Crime, if it is on the rise, is due in large part to the fact that waiting in the wings are lawyers who are willing to go beyond professional responsibility, professional rights, professional duties, in their defense of a criminal." That statement, like others from Hoffman, seemed incredible; American judicial tradition dictates that, no matter what the crime, a defendant is entitled to full, vigorous representation.

In the Federal Building jury room and then in the Palmer House hotel, the jury of ten women and two men argued and horse-traded for four days before reaching a verdict on the charges against the Chicago Seven--which were that they had conspired to incite a riot during the 1968 convention, and that they had individually crossed state lines with intent to foment a riot. In the long days of the trial, the jurors--ordinary Americans perplexed by the impassioned pleas and portentous issues set before them--had almost become forgotten people. At first a majority of eight, including the two men, favored convicting all of the defendants of both conspiracy and the individual charges; three women insisted on complete acquittal, one vacillated between the two camps. Agreement was finally reached late at night, with each faction holed up in a separate hotel room, through the mediating efforts of one of the majority--the youngest juror, Kay Richards, 23, a computer operator.

"Feelings were so high, with the two groups against each other, we just didn't feel at ease in there in the jury room together," Miss Richards said later. By her account, "three women thought the law the defendants were indicted under was unconstitutional." That is a question for an appeals court, she explained to them, not for the jury. "So we agreed we should not be a hung jury. We decided to compromise, and it was just a question of how to compromise." Said another juror, Mrs. Ruth Petersen, 44, who favored conviction on both counts for all and admitted that there was not one of the defendants she really liked: "Half a chicken is better than none at all. We were all anxious to go home." Jurors are often moved by just such sentiments, but they rarely confess it so bluntly.

Finally, the jury reached a verdict. For all seven defendants, on the conspiracy counts of the indictment: not guilty. For five of them--Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin--on the count that they had crossed state lines and acted individually to encourage a riot: guilty as charged. The other two defendants, John Froines and Lee Weiner, were acquitted on the second count as well.

Jail Terms. Before sentencing the five convicted men Judge Hoffman sat back in his deep chair and let them make statements free from interruption. Dellinger: "Like George III, you are trying to hold back the tide of history, you are trying to hold back a second American revolution." Abbie Hoffman: "I'm an outlaw. I always knew free speech wasn't allowed in present-day America." Hayden: "They were bound to put us away." Rubin: "This is the happiest moment of my life." Davis: "My jury will be in the streets tomorrow all over the country." Defense Attorney Kunstler protested that Judge Hoffman was "wrong legally and morally" to sentence the defendants only two days after the verdict. "To say I am morally wrong," Hoffman replied, "can only add to your present troubles."

Hoffman then sentenced each of the five convicted under the antiriot law to maximum jail terms of five years and imposed on each a $5,000 fine, half the allowable maximum. The jail terms are to run concurrently with the contempt sentences, so that none will have to serve more than five years in all--even if appeals fail and no paroles are granted. But Hoffman added an unusual zinger. The five will have to pay portions of the costs of their own prosecution.* The total costs could run as high as $50,000. They will stay in jail, said the judge, until both the fines and the costs are paid. He also refused to let the five out on bond pending appeal, calling them "dangerous men." The lawyers, however, were allowed their freedom to begin the appeal.

Endless Provocations. The trial thus ended with the same total hostility and mutual incomprehension that stained it from the start, and it left basic legal questions unresolved (see box, page 10). Both sides confirmed each other's prejudices. If the defendants and their lawyers seemed determined to provoke Judge Hoffman and convert the courtroom into an arena for political confrontation, the prosecution and the bench often came across as heavyhanded, harsh enforcers of questionable statutes.

The defendants' provocations were ingenious and seemingly endless. They delivered songs and poems from the witness stand; two of the accused showed up wearing what looked like judges' robes. They irked Hoffman by calling him "Julie." Often their words and actions were vicious. While Assistant Prosecutor Richard Schultz was examining one witness, he claims, "Rennie Davis moved over and kept whispering things like 'You dirty fascist Jew!' "

For his part, Judge Hoffman issued a series of astonishing rulings. He jailed two lawyers for failing to appear in court, even though they had only helped to prepare the defense. He barred such potentially important defense witnesses as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Civil Rights Leader Ralph Abernathy. Before the jury, he praised Chief Prosecutor Thomas Aquinas Foran and put down Defense Attorney Weinglass by consistently mispronouncing his name.

Observed Weinglass: "Where you had a prosecutor who was honestly and sincerely convinced that these men were evil and were out to overthrow the Government, and you had the Seven also honestly and sincerely convinced that the Government which was prosecuting them is fascistic--given those factors, you could not have an orderly proceeding." Attorney Kunstler argued: "It's against the law to kill--yet people kill all the time to protect their families and the law allows it. What's to happen in a courtroom when the judge commits an injustice?" The regular appellate process, as he sees it, is no longer adequate to judge the judges. He explained: "I never was this way before. I re-evaluated the role of the lawyer in a political case, and concluded that he has to develop a certain aggressiveness even though it may run counter to the rules the system has devised."

Draconian Rulings. Few lawyers would agree with his conclusion. But even Administration officials who favored the prosecution privately confess to dismay at Judge Hoffman's performance as trial judge. They feel that he was too old and too insensitive for the task, and that his Draconian rulings and severe contempt sentences obscured the charges against the defendants. However, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst put a cheerful face on the outcome. "We think it's a good result," he said. "We felt the evidence justified conviction on the conspiracy charge, but that's what juries are for." Kleindienst added that the Government will not hesitate to invoke the conspiracy statute again "when we come up with a set of facts" that justifies it.

The rebels, though decrying their treatment, exulted in their martyrdom. Rennie Davis offered a challenge to Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Foran. Said Davis: "When I get out I'm going to move right next door to Mr. Foran and I'm going to turn his kids into Viet Cong." Abbie Hoffman's wife Anita proclaimed: "If there wasn't a conspiracy before, there, sure as hell is one now." As a practical matter, however, the radical movement has lost--at least for the time being--some of its shrewdest and most daring leaders. Thus the violent antiwar left, like the Black Panthers, will doubtless suffer from a vacuum at the top.

But there are still many sympathizers at the bottom. In Manhattan, some 1,500 youths demonstrated; some set upon police with snowballs, rocks, bottles, and chunks of metal. Some 25,000 turned out to protest in Boston; about twelve were beaten to the ground by police. Bank windows in Ann Arbor were broken during a march of 2,000 protesters.

Rioters smashed the windows of more than 95 businesses in Berkeley and eight buildings in Palo Alto, including Stanford's Hoover Library. Seattle found itself in the middle of its worst outbreak of violence in decades: some in a crowd of 2,000 demonstrators broke bank windows and lobbed blue paint bombs, rocks and tear-gas grenades at the entrance to the federal courthouse before 290 nightstick-swinging police dispersed them. In Washington, D.C., a group of 500--chanting, "Two, four, six, eight, liberate the Watergate"--marched on the luxury Potomac-side apartment complex that houses a number of high Nixon Administration officials, including Attorney General John Mitchell.

What makes the case of the Chicago Seven special is the breakdown of discipline in a court of law, a problem unparalleled even in celebrated trials of this century that carried strong political overtones--Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, the eleven Communist leaders in the 1949 Dennis case. Undoubtedly a greater share of the blame for the breakdown rests on the defendants than on the judge. Still, Boston Attorney Herbert Ehrmann, who defended Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s, says of the Chicago trials: "The conduct of the judge and the actions of the defendants were all disgraceful. The whole episode was a disgrace to American justice." The American judicial system as a whole is far sounder than the trial suggested. But few events have put that system to such a brutal test as the case of the Chicago Seven.

*Although the practice is uncommon in federal district courts, judges may assess certain costs of prosecution against convicted criminal defendants, except in a capital case.

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