Читать книгу The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript - Bruce A. Ragsdale - Страница 11

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The randomly assigned judge, Julius Jennings Hoffman, became as much of a symbol as any of the defendants. Judge Hoffman’s imperious manner and apparent bias against the defendants inflamed tensions in what would have been a confrontational trial under any circumstances. At 73, Hoffman had been on the federal bench since his appointment by Eisenhower in 1953, and lawyers in Chicago described him as a judge who usually sided with the government attorneys. Judge Hoffman was proud of the efficiency with which he managed cases, and from the first encounters with the defense attorneys, he was determined to show that he would exercise strong control over the case. When four of the attorneys serving the defense during the pretrial proceedings withdrew from the case before the start of the trial, Hoffman held them in contempt, ordered their arrest, and had two of them jailed. A nationwide protest of prominent lawyers convinced Judge Hoffman to relent and accept the new defense team of William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass. Throughout the trial, Kunstler and Weinglass aggressively challenged Judge Hoffman’s procedural rulings, which almost uniformly affirmed the motions of the prosecution.

In his examination of prospective jurors, Hoffman ignored all but one of the questions submitted by the defense attorneys and never asked potential jurors about pretrial publicity or about their attitudes toward student radicals or the Vietnam War. The jury of ten women and two men was selected in a day. Within a week, Hoffman learned that the homes of two jurors had received identical letters saying that the Black Panthers were watching them. After one of those two jurors acknowledged that she could not be impartial in light of the threat, the judge replaced her with an alternate juror and sequestered the remaining jurors for the duration of the trial. Seale denied any Black Panther involvement with the letters.