Word: antiriot
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...sound reason for the wholesale raking of a crowd with gunfire. The police apparently had come armed only for shooting and had no less lethal equipment. No tear gas was used; there was no warning given to the crowd. Their shotguns were loaded with deadly 00 buckshot rather than antiriot birdshot. They also showed little hesitation to use their weapons; the five-story building was spattered indiscriminately with gunfire from top to bottom. Every window on that end of the dorm was shattered. No effort had been made to fire warning shots or shoot over the crowd's heads...
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...
Seeking a Soapbox. Further problems were almost inevitable, since most legal scholars have serious constitutional doubts about the 1968 federal antiriot law that Mitchell used. The law bans interstate travel or communication with intent to "incite or encourage" a riot, and it sweepingly defines a riot as any demonstration involving as few as three people and one act of violence endangering property or other people. According to some scholars, anyone who crosses a state line intending to join a demonstration that becomes violent now runs the risk of Government prosecution, even though others incite the ruckus. As critics...
...sentences and probe potentially reversible errors by Hoffman. But the outcome may be confusing. Although the Chicago Seven were acquitted of conspiracy -thanks to the jury that most of them disdained-the courtroom warfare may make it unnecessary for an appeals court to rule on the constitutionality of the antiriot law on First Amendment grounds. Whatever the result, the Chicago trial underscores an old lesson: courts are poor places for resolving ideological conflicts. In a strong democracy, such cases should not be inevitable in times of social stress. When they do occur, the judicial process that stands between reason...
...prison, $1,000 fine) that forbids public officials to inflict summary punishment. The eighth was accused of perjury for denying that he had struck anyone. All eight policemen have since been tried and acquitted. The eight radicals, charged with violating as well as conspiring to violate the far stiffer antiriot law, represented virtually every brand of insurgency that challenged U.S. politics in the 1960s. Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis were among the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin typified the anarchistic yippies (Youth International Party). David Dellinger was a prominent pacifist; John Froines...