Word: coffin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Inside the Post Office, in an austerely decorated twelfth-story courtroom, the adversaries in the case gathered last week for the first encounter in what may be a long legal duel. The five defendants--Spock, Yale Chaplain William Sloan Coffin, Harvard graduate student Michael K. Ferber, writer Mitchell Goodman, and former National Security Council staffer Marcus Raskin--were all there, each with one or more attorneys. So were Judge Francis J.W. Ford, who will hear the case, and assistant U.S. attorney John Wall, who will argue the government's side, at least at first. In addition, there was the usual...
Another defense argument, advanced by James D. St. Clair, Coffin's attorney, is that the value of encouraging as open a public discussion as possible under the First Amendment overbalances the relatively harmless violation of draft regulations. (St. Clair himself, a lecturer on law at Harvard, is a veteran of liberal campaigns. He was one of Joseph Welch's chief aides in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.) To convict the five men, St. Clair said, would have the effect of "chilling" debate on the draft and the war by raising the menace of Federal prosecution...
...trial hearings opened in Boston yesterday in the case of Dr. Benjamin Spock, Yale chaplain the Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr., and three others charged by the Federal government with conspiring to encourage draft resistance...
...five--Spock, Coffin, Ferber, Marcus Raskin, director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and Mitchell Goodman '46, a writer--are charged with conspiring to counsel, aid, and abet men to refuse military service and to violate provisions of the Selective Service...
...There seems to me no doubt that the turning in of a draft card is symbolic free speech," said James St. Clair, Coffin's attorney, adding that "the privilege of these defendants to oppose the action of their government is the traditional, classic thing that is protected by the First Amendment...