The Meaning of the Chicago Trial

...But in the closing hours, a brief speech by Abbie Hoffman, one of the five convicted defendants, provided the glimpse of meaning, that brief hint of the point to which we all had come...

...In the Chicago case, the Government chose to top it off with a separate conspiracy charge, which lends an additional advantage to the prosecution...

...The anti-riot law "is a convenient club for the Justice Department to wave around...

...Then, Dellinger mentioned that he was going to Chicago where he expected "problems" to develop...

...It was an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which was enacted primarily to protect the rights of those seeking to exercise their legal rights, such as voting and attending integrated schools...

...Obviously the Ohio crowd is not going to leap aboard airplanes and fly with kerosene-slaked rags to San Francisco...

...Furthermore, he said, a successful prosecution would require a showing that a defendant intended to promote a riot "at the very time the inciter crosses a state line...

...Still, he can be prosecuted...

...The whole silly episode • would have been unimportant except for one fact: The Government was presenting an event to demonstrate what Davis's "intent" had been before the convention started...

...Government concedes the fact that the anti-riot law puts a new restriction on what is normally regarded as free speech...

...Similar examples—events that were in themselves legal but which in the riot-law context became part of a criminal act—are littered throughout the trial record...

...By its action, Newsweek commented, ". . . the Federal Government escalated the war" against the dissident radicals of the Left...

...He was stretching the point a bit, of course, but not much...

...So as Judge Hoffman began handing down the five-year sentences, Abbie Hoffman had no particular act prepared...

...Under the anti-riot law of 1968, the most basic function of local government—preserving the peace—becomes an arena for Federal encroachment...

...but it is also language protected under court decisions requiring prosecutors to show that a particular speech creates a clear and present danger of violence...

...The peculiar nature of this statute's language was best described in a brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union: "The gist of the offense is not the participation in a riot or even the instigation of a riot...

...An aura of theatricality surrounds him and he customarily displays himself in carefully-tailored roles for the mass media...

...If he then goes to San Francisco, circulates a militantly-worded pamphlet, and proposes to some friends a legal demonstration, he has completed the second half of his crime...

...Actually, there seemed little that Congress could do because every respectable study of those riots revealed them to be spontaneous eruptions ignited by routine police incidents in areas where poverty and inequality had long provided the tinder...

...Using such evidence, it is difficult to imagine any confrontation resulting in even minor disorders which could not be prosecuted...

...Because of its vagueness, no one can even be certain when he himself is or is not violating the statute...

...Abbie Hoffman is obsessed with irony and paradox...

...Under the statute, wild rhetoric of the sort commonly used by most of the defendants becomes solid evidence, regardless of whether it instigates a riot...

...Each of the defendants was accused of conspiring with one another to violate the anti-riot law...

...There have been other reports that the current investigation of Black Panther Party militants may be hinged to prosecutions under the anti-riot law...

...That is not the point...

...A simple longdistance telephone call (interstate commerce facilities) that could be construed as demonstrating an "intent" to cause trouble would be sufficient to ensnare the unwary...

...Liberals put up little opposition, fearing they would endanger the civil rights package for which they had struggled so long...

...In a traditional inciting-to-riot trial, the question would have been: Did Rubin's words directly contribute to the disorders...

...The 1968 anti-riot statute is in itself a prosecutor's delight...

...A "riot" is defined as a public disturbance involving an act of violence by one or more persons who are in a group of three or more persons...

...There was talk, said the prosecution, of "seizing the Hilton Hotel...

...The riot is underway...

...Its very existence has a stifling effect on dissent...

...Many professional civil libertarians confidently predict the law will be ruled unconstitutional on appeal...

...One group of lawyers contends that virtually every form of social protest of the past decade, from Selma to Chicago, could be prosecuted under its language if the Government becomes sufficiently zealous in pursuit of dissenters...

...A Chicago police spy, recalled Assistant U.S...

...A defendant talked of firebombing the underground garage beneath Grant Park, but it never happened...

...But on February 20, he was not prepared for the scene...

...Dellinger, said the FBI informant doubling as a cameraman, told a crowd that anything should be done to disrupt the Government in an effort to stop the "insane" war in Vietnam...

...His was an impromptu pre-sentencing statement, ringing with frustration and contempt...

...But even the U.S...

...But courts have a way of swaying with the political tides and following election returns...

...He and the other four convicted men had not expected to be sentenced that day...

...Out of his sense of personal injustice, Hoffman had put his finger on the central issue of the trial—the anti-riot law itself, the most dangerous and repressive piece of Federal legislation in thirty years...

...Abbie Hoffman had worked in the civil rights movement in Georgia and Mississippi in the early 1960s when such endeavors were most dangerous...

...Jerry Rubin probably said it best when he told Norman Mailer in December, 1967, that Chicago would do unto itself what the rebels could never hope to accomplish...

...The offenders need not cross state lines to become entangled in the net...

...It is in these contexts that the trial became, truly, an examination into a person's "state of mind...

...Under the anti-riot law, however, the speech becomes half a crime because it shows the speaker's intent...

...Even the bewildered jury could not be induced to accept the notion that seven such disparate characters could conspire to accomplish anything so elaborate as the Chicago riots...

...The latter observation evokes intriguing thoughts...

...one imagines an FBI undercover agent interviewing a suspected rioter at the precise moment their airliner flies across a state border...

...Imagine the case of a speaker declaring in Columbus, Ohio, that the city of San Francisco ought to be burned down...

...Some lawyers, furthermore, contend that the higher courts may never reach the constitutional issue but will overturn the convictions on grounds that the trial judge erred in his handling of the proceedings...

...Congressmen of both liberal and conservative persuasions were under pressure to do something—anything—to end the explosions in the slums...

...Cramer's bill passed the House and a similar version, sponsored the following year by Senators Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Republican, and Frank J. Lausche, Ohio Democrat, was tagged onto the civil rights bill after cloture had been voted...

...The law, of course, is not a civil rights act...

...In any case, the law is a convenient club for the Justice Department to wave around...

...Of course it never happened, but such talk showed what the defendants hoped would happen...

...That is unpleasant language...

...The trial had been, he said, like "Alice in Wonderland in 1984...

...Cramer's bill was unnecessary, he said, because all states have inciting-to-riot statutes that are easier to prosecute...

...And then, in a burst of bitter irony, he summed it all up: "I think it was only fitting that a guy like me who worked on civil rights down South, and got beat up eleven or twelve times, and walked those dusty roads with no bread—that I would go to jail under a civil rights act...

...The law brings us a long way from the traditional assumption that people physically or vocally must do wrong things before they can be convicted of inciting riots...

...The crime is completed when that person thereafter commits any "overt act" aimed at organizing, promoting, or encouraging a riot...

...Schultz said, "That tells you what he intended," adding, as if it were an afterthought, that of course Rubin's remark could not really be considered an incitement...

...No one cart seriously contend that the five convicted men came to Chicago with completely peaceful motives, although they did make every effort to arrange purely legal and non-violent demonstrations...

...One of the more curious ironies of the law is its history of support by conservatives customarily found wringing their hands over Federal incursions into local affairs...

...In the presentation of evidence, for example, Rennie Davis could be held responsible for what Abbie Hoffman said or did...

...It seemed for nearly five months that the "Chicago Seven" trial would provide no such clarifying moment...

...Suddenly, the pressures for a punitive law were irresistible on Capitol Hill...

...The prosecution, the defense, and the judge, so everyone said, had done their utmost to discredit the processes of justice, and nothing significant could emerge...

...Consider this piece of evidence against Rennie Davis: Months before the convention, Davis allegedly was overheard discussing the possibility of bringing canisters of a chemical debilitating agent to Chicago for use against police...

...Under the anti-riot law provisions, however, the question becomes: Did he even say them at all?—because if he did the words become an "overt act" in furtherance of his intent to cause a riot...

...They decided, to their credit, that no conspiracy existed...

...It may be some horrendous event, such as the exposure of Mylai which told us finally what we had done to Vietnam, or it may be a quiet word or some explosion of emotion...

...Thus, the Government labored for days to show that Jerry Rubin was howling "Fight the pigs" in Lincoln Park on the night of the convention week's first confrontation...

...Charges of police brutality ring out, and, like turning up the flame under a caldron of simmering oil, the boiling point is quickly reached...

...Whatever he does in San Francisco can be construed as being the "overt act" committed in furtherance of his intent to incite a riot...

...Into this vacuum stepped Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown with a couple of incendiary speeches (in Tennessee and Cambridge, Maryland) in 1967 which were followed by violent episodes...

...It could even be provoked by counter-demonstrators...

...he had, like most of the other defendants, pursued the normal, legal avenues of social protest for most of a decade...

...It is entirely possible that this nebulous, unnecessary, and repressive law, born in the riots of the 1960s, will be around to haunt us for all too many years of the 1970s...

...In his wake are thousands of Negroes whose blood is simmering—waiting for the instant certain to occur in any large city when a felon is arrested or shot...

...In other words, two actions which separately are legal can, under the statute, amount to illegal behavior...

...Given the peculiarly nebulous character of the law, the jury verdict finding five of the "Chicago Seven" guilty of violating it is hardly surprising...

...The whole episode was solemnly laid out before the jury for no purpose other than to explore Dellinger's state of mind—or, legally, his "intent...

...The same bill carried with it the compromise which became the open-housing act, then regarded as the most controversial and significant part of the whole package...

...Davis denied it, contending that the Government's informant had misunderstood the conversation...

...The law had its origins in the Congressional panic of 1966 and 1967 when ghetto riots seemed to be a permanent feature of American life...

...Rather, it is the crossing of a state line or the use of a facility of commerce with 'evil intent' and the commission or attempted commission of some overt act for an 'illegal purpose.' " The overt act presumed to complete the crime, said the ACLU, may be no more belligerent an act than "circulating a pamphlet or making a phone call...

...The core of the law is its language prohibiting anyone from crossing a state line or using facilities of interstate commerce with "intent" to incite a riot...

...John Doar, an assistant attorney general during the Johnson Administration, opposed the legislation...

...But the anti-riot section, under which the five defendants were convicted of crossing a state line with intent to incite a riot at the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, may turn out to be the most important element in that package...

...Later that year, before his version passed the House, Representative William C. Cramer, Florida Republican, described the activities of Carmichael in this fashion: After making a fiery speech, ". . . Carmichael then usually leaves that jurisdiction...

...WILLIAM CHAPMAN is a national affairs correspondent for The Washington Post who covered the trial of the Chicago Seven...

...The vagueness and artificiality of such a construction may astound most of us who possess limited comprehension of law...

...More recently, the Government invoked this law to secure indictments of the Chicago Twelve, a dozen leaders of the leftist and violence-prone Weatherman faction, even though the Twelve had already been arrested on a number of state charges, including mob action and aggravated battery, stemming from the four window-smashing "days of rage" in Chicago last October...

...The disorder may be none of his doing...

...In a pre-trial brief filed in Chicago, the Government made this intriguing and altogether frightening observation: "The fact that many of the defendants' activities were in and of themselves lawful exercises of their First Amendment rights is irrelevant...

...If the comments of Justice Department officials can be taken at face value, it will be the most powerful weapon in their war on radical and not-so-radical dissent...

...With the composition of the Supreme Court changing rather quickly, it is no longer certain that the long chain of decisions upholding civil liberties will be extended...

...Deputy Attorney General Richard G. Klein-dienst informed us last fall that the law might be used against leaders of the New Mobilization Committee To End The War In Vietnam, which organized the gigantic November j^ace rally in Washington, but the Justice Department took no action...

...It hardly mattered whether the defendants had come into Chicago armed with howitzers and napalm or merely with pamphlets and vile language...

...But for what other reason than depicting David Dellinger's state of mind did the Government produce a television cameraman from San Diego to testify about a speech Dellinger made before the convention began...

...Even purely local ones could be brought under the Federal statute's sweep...

...It had been a bewildering and eventually boring series of arguments, outbursts, and conflicting testimonies...

...and he was being convicted under a law whose history precisely mirrored the nation's ambiguous attitude toward reform, a law in which social justice and repression were neatly mixed...

...Perhaps too many...

...They came at least with the expectation that Chicago could not endure a massive confrontation without some disorder erupting...

...One way to comprehend this strange verbiage is to understand that two "rights" can add up to a "wrong...

...The prosecution bristled every time that description was applied, of course...

...Attorney Richard G. Schultz in his summation, heard Rubin declare, "We should isolate one or two of the pigs and kill them...

...They thought they were being brought into Judge Julius J. Hoffman's courtroom merely to hear a routine motion argued by their lawyers...

...It is vague and loosely-constructed, as pliable as taffy in the hands of a Government lawyer twisting it this way and that for the benefit of a confused jury...

...The defendants had difficulty raising funds to meet trial expenses because so many well-wishing friends thought the law was a sort of bad joke that would quickly go away when appealed...