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The attorneys

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Thomas A. Foran (1924-2000)

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U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois

Thomas A. Foran Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

As U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Thomas Foran was the lead prosecutor in the Chicago conspiracy trial. Foran, with the assistance of Richard Schultz, presented a case based largely on the testimony of undercover policemen and paid informants, who told of the defendants’ plans to disrupt Chicago during the Democratic convention and to provoke law enforcement officers to resort to violence against the demonstrators. Foran aggressively challenged the defense arguments, and his frequent objections were almost always sustained by Judge Hoffman. Throughout the trial, Foran portrayed the defendants as sophisticated revolutionaries who manipulated the alienation of young people. He also emphasized that most of the defendants were much older than the students they attempted to organize. Within days of the close of the trial, Foran continued to stir controversy when he appeared at a public meeting at a Chicago high school and used anti-gay slurs to describe all of the defendants except Bobby Seale.

In its opinion reversing the criminal convictions of five of the defendants, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit criticized Foran for his “considerable number" of derogatory comments about the defense. The appeals court found that Foran’s final arguments in the case “went at least up to, and probably beyond, the outermost boundary of permissible inferences from the evidence in his characterizations of defendants." The court cited as particularly offensive Foran’s references to “evil men" and “anarchists."

The Chicago-born Foran attended Loyola University and the law school of the University of Detroit before entering into private practice in Chicago. He was well connected in Democratic circles in Chicago and was appointed U.S. attorney by President Johnson in 1968. In his short tenure as U.S. attorney, Foran successfully prosecuted a number of individuals involved in organized crime. Following the election of a Republican President, Foran intended to resign on July 1, 1969, but the Nixon administration’s Justice Department requested that Foran stay on as U.S. attorney to prosecute the Chicago conspiracy trial. Following his resignation as U.S. attorney in 1970, Foran returned to private practice in Chicago.