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.