Word: spock
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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...
...defense attorneys could not have been overly surprised, since American courts have always shunned issues of war and peace as being unsuited for judicial inquiry. In fact, sticking to more established lines of defense probably gives the five men a better chance of acquittal. But anyone who hoped Spock might be martyring himself to open a legal route of attack against the war is sure to be disappointed...
EVEN with the legality of the war set aside, the Spock case seems certain to raise fundamental questions of free speech and the limits of dissent. Last week's hearings, in theory, dealt only with several defense motions to dismiss the indictment as too vague, or to force the government to reveal more facts about its charges of conspiracy. In arguing the motions, however, the five's lawyers rehearsed a powerful defense based on the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech...
...there are two problems with the free speech agrument. Speech is not absolutely protected, and the man who, as in Justice Holmes' famous example, shouts fire in a crowded theatre is liable to prosecution. Spock and the four others are accused of interfering with the operation of the Selective Service System by verbally counselling young men to defy its regulations, and if the government can prove that their speech was the direct cause of someone's lawbreaking, they may well be convicted...
...existence of the anti-draft conspiracy. The lawyers pressed particularly to discredit the government's depiction of the alleged conspiracy's size. "Anything that happened within the nation--I would assume all 50 states--could come with in the purview of this indictment," St. Clair said. Leonard Boudin, Spock's sad-eyed attorney, was particularly critical of the indictment's supposed vagueness...