Conspiracy Trial Research Articles

Repeated, imagined, hearsay

Abstract In this paper, I analyse the representation of reported discourse in testimony from a 1795 conspiracy trial. I present a framework for analysing scribal intervention in discourse reporting and show that, although the transcription conventions of historical criminal proceedings offer the appearance of being objective representations, recorded testimony privileges idealised representations of speech events. In fact, a special status is given to those speech events to which those in the courtroom were not privy, that is, hearsay. When scribes use Direct Discourse to report this type of speech, they are simultaneously marking it as evidence available for judicial decision-making and distancing themselves from the judgment and interpretation process. I show that this is particularly problematic for interpreted testimony. This has implications for both our understanding of historical courtroom processes and the use of trial transcripts for historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic analysis.

The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason

Reviewed by: The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason Christopher Coski Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Yale UP, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-300-25955-1. Pp. 304. Mason's study examines in detail the conspiracy trial of Gracchus Babeuf and his allies during the regime of the Directory. The constitution of 1795, which established the Directory, restricted freedom of the press and of assembly, undermining the popular activism that had marked the Revolution itself, in the name of restoring order. Babeuf was one of the leading voices demanding a return to the freedoms of the 1793 constitution, criticizing the government via newspaper and pamphlet, advocating the abolition of private property as the root of inequality, and supporting the inherent right of citizens to revolt against repressive government. Mason's book lays this contextual foundation very well in the first four chapters, which close with Babeuf's life of hiding and clandestine publication, and his eventual arrest. The greater part of the work, chapters five through thirteen, presents a highly detailed account of the trial of Babeuf and his associates. These chapters offer a compelling narrative in which the reader sees rampant irregularities and political agendas informing the judicial process, which ultimately led to the execution of Babeuf and one associate, and the exile of several others. The final two chapters analyze the philosophical, political, and social aftermath of the proceedings. The conclusion offers an inspiring connection to the present day, underlining how Babeuf "lent singular voice to a chorus that continues to demand liberation from grinding poverty, political exclusion, and the disdain of difference," and "to demand a society that nourishes and respects all its members" (234). Throughout the work, Mason inserts assessments of alternatives that might have occurred if the actors involved had made different choices. Just to cite one example: "Ultimately, it was up to the directors to overcome […] polarization and safeguard the center they had sworn to protect. They might have done so by extending olive branches to both sides […]. They might have refused to vilify skepticism […] and to treat the alleged plot as the tip of an iceberg of extremism" (82). These critical assessments of how things might otherwise have played out make the reader truly feel that what is being witnessed was, at the time, not a history carved in stone, but a living, breathing, present moment that could have turned in any number of possible directions had other choices been made. Sources include a wide array of both primary and secondary texts. Mason's prose is clear and well organized, making the work accessible to a wide range of readers. The subject matter is, perhaps, narrowly focused enough that it may not pique the interest of non-specialists, but Mason's book is definitely worthy of the attention of scholars of the Revolution and its aftermath. In particular, scholars with an interest in the Directory will not want to overlook this work. [End Page 212] Christopher Coski Ohio University Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

The World History Commons

The Journal of American History publishes regular reviews of digital history projects. The digital history reviews are edited by Jeffrey McClurken Please contact him at jmcclurk@umw.edu if you would like to suggest a digital history project for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/. The World History Commons (Whc), funded from 2018 to 2021 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, includes long-running digital projects, many developed and launched by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media from 2003 to 2018. To sources from such instructional classics as “Making the History of 1989” and the “Amboyna Conspiracy Trial” have been added newly produced resources for instructors and students of world history. The principal investigators Kelly Schrum and Jessica Otis, both of George Mason University, also received expanded funding by the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension Grant (2020–2022) for “Expanding the Commons: Supporting Emerging World History Scholars and Community Colleges through the World History Commons.” Besides the principal investigators, the steering committee for the Whc includes Merry Wiesner-Hanks, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Adam Clulow of the University of Texas at Austin, and Nate Sleeter of George Mason University.

The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason

Situating the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and his co-conspirators in its poisonous political setting, Mason provides a new perspective on the French Revolution’s downfall. She examines the Conspiracy of Equals and the show trial of the man whom Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered the first revolutionary communist, given maximum publicity by the corrupt ruling Directory in hopes of rallying public opinion for their centrist regime. Mason seeks to write “a history of the French Revolution for the twenty-first century,” worried about rising authoritarianism, faltering judicial integrity, and the erosion of democratic institutions (5).In this fluent narrative history, the first book about the Directory era readily available for wide reading, Mason places Babeuf in his historical context. After a brief overview of Babeuf’s rise from a feudal notary’s apprentice to a Paris-provisioning official and subsequent imprisonment after the Thermidor Coup against Robespierre and his allies, Mason turns to the troubled history of the Directory regime’s attempt to combat polarization on both the neo-Jacobin left and pseudo-royalist right while its own ranks became beset with corruption, careerism, and authoritarian manipulation. The content of Babeuf’s conspiracy, and even the trial, receive little detailed attention; instead, Mason examines how the Directory enthusiastically publicized the Conspiracy of Equals as a scare tactic against the political left, first publishing its papers and then paying stenographers to transcribe the courtroom proceedings and thus ensure the fullest possible coverage in France’s newspapers. Opposition papers, however, treated the Equals as heroes. An able scholar of French Revolutionary print culture, Mason’s extensive research captures the press’ vibrancy during an often-overlooked period. The book successfully explores the Directory’s bizarre politics and its ultimate failure, as regime candidates were badly trounced in the next election. Rather than seeking compromise thereafter, Directors undertook several coups to stay in power, before ultimately being unseated during and after Napoleon Bonaparte’s 18 Brumaire seizure of power in 1799.Though effectively deconstructing the trial’s political context, Mason pays surprisingly little attention to Babeuf’s ideas about equality or to the complex but powerful meanings that revolutionary conceptions had assumed over the revolution’s radical phase. She dismisses fellow conspirator Filippo Buonarotti’s memoir about Babeuf as hagiography without detailed refutation. She claims that Babeuf “misread” Enlightenment philosophers’ egalitarian writings, but she refrains from discussing the processes of creative adaptation and inspiration that had marked revolutionary thought (172). The Babeuf of this history seems little more than the Directory’s discursive creation.Mason also attempts to smother any hopes for either the Conspiracy of Equals or the Neo-Jacobin left, claiming that “the French Revolution was [already] over and the people had been defeated.” Yet even the dismantling of radical networks since Thermidor did not necessarily doom future movements, given the spontaneous uprisings that had marked the revolution’s earlier phases (100–101). She also seeks to distance Babeuf from the “neo-Babouvists” of the 1840s who helped to inspire Marx (227). The Last Revolutionaries is a dispiriting title for anyone interested in Babeuf’s legacies. Her avoidance of the revolution’s continued radical potential risks falling into the Directory’s own centrist trap.

The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason

The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason

A Soli Deo Gloria és a Magyar Testvéri Közösség kapcsolata

"The Relationship between the Soli Deo Gloria Student Association and the Hungarian Fraternal Community. The Reformed Youth Organization, i.e. the Soli Deo Gloria Student Association, and the Hungarian Fraternal Community were closely related. The Community was a secret organization with an anti-Nazi stance and was dissatisfied with the social system of the Horthy era. Soli Deo Gloria embraced the social problems and opposed Nazism. The common approach has created cooperation. The Hungarian Fraternal Community as a secret organization became the main defendant in the Conspiracy Trial of 1947. It was accused of wanting to overthrow the republic and was called a terrorist organization. The presentation of the cooperation between Soli Deo Gloria and the Community aims to reveal the true nature of the latter. The Hungarian Fraternal Community wanted to provide help from the background and not to enforce its will. Keywords: Reformed youth organization, Soli Deo Gloria Student Association, Hungarian Fraternal Community, Conspiracy Trial of 1947, anti-Nazi movement, social problems of the Horthy era "

The subtle effects of implicit bias instructions

AbstractJudges are increasingly using “implicit bias” instructions in jury trials in an effort to reduce the influence of jurors' biases on judgment. In this article, we report on findings from a large‐scale mock jury study that tests the impact of implicit bias instructions on judgment in a case where defendant race was varied (Black or White). Using an experimental design, we collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative data at the individual and group levels obtained from 120 small groups who viewed a simulated federal drug conspiracy trial and then deliberated to determine a verdict. We find that while participants were sensitized to the importance of being unbiased, implicit bias instructions had no measurable impact on verdict outcomes relative to the standard instructions. Our analysis of the deliberations, however, reveals that those who heard the implicit bias instructions were more likely to discuss the issue of bias, potentially with both ameliorative and harmful effects on the defendant. Most significantly, we identified multiple instances where, in an effort to avoid bias, participants who heard the implicit bias instructions interfered with their own or other participants' appropriate assessments of witness credibility.

The Courtroom as an Arena of Ideological and Political Confrontation: The Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial

Normative theories of law conceive the courtroom as a geometrically delineated, politically neutral, and linguistically transparent space designed for a fair and orderly administration of justice. The trial, the most legalistic of all legal acts, is widely regarded as a site of truth and justice elevated above and beyond the expediency of ideology and politics. These conceptions are further underpinned by certain normative understandings of sovereignty, the subject, and politics where sovereignty is conceived as self-instituting and self-limiting; the subject is understood as an autonomous and rational being capable of self-consciousness and self-representation; and politics is posited as the exercise of reason in the public sphere. In this article, I argue that such a normative conceptualization of the criminal trial and the courtroom not only ignores structures of power and privilege that produce inequalities but also forecloses possibilities for transformative judicial praxis. Drawing on the 1969–1970 trial of eight radical activists accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the article argues for a performative re-conceptualization of sovereignty, the subject, and the law as indeterminate, unpredictable, and open-ended discursive formations. The article demonstrates how the accused, working with and against legal doctrines, norms, and discourses, rethought normative conceptions of sovereignty, law, and subjectivity as contingent power-knowledge constellations that are open, unpredictable, and un-closable.

Race, witness credibility, and jury deliberation in a simulated drug trafficking trial.

The present study integrates several distinct lines of jury decision-making research by examining how the racial identities of the defendant and an informant witness interact in a federal drug conspiracy trial scenario and by assessing whether jurors' individual racial identity and jury group racial composition influence their judgments. We predicted that jurors would be biased against the Black defendant and would be more likely to convict after exposure to a White informant, among other hypotheses. We recruited 822 nonstudent jury-eligible participants assigned to 144 jury groups. Each group was assigned to one of four onditions where defendant race (Black or White) and informant race (Black or White) was manipulated. Each group watched a realistic audio-visual trial presentation, then deliberated as a group to render a verdict. Contrary to expectations, the conditions depicting a Black defendant yielded lower conviction rates compared to those with a White defendant-at both the predeliberation individual (odds ratio [OR] = 1.54) and postdeliberation group level (OR = 2.91)-while the informant race did not influence verdict outcomes. We also found that jurors rated the government witnesses as more credible when the defendant was White compared to when he was Black. Credibility ratings and verdict outcomes were also predicted by jurors' own race, although juror race did not interact with the race conditions when predicting verdicts. Jurors are sensitive to defendant race, and this sensitivity appears to strengthen after deliberation-but in a direction opposite to what was expected. One potential implication of our findings is that juries may operate as a check on system bias by applying greater scrutiny to law enforcement-derived evidence when the defendant is Black. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Conspiracy Rises Again

Abstract This essay takes up conspiracy as a discursive, political, and philosophical concept. By tracing the ideological and textual kinship between anticolonialism in India and Ireland and radicalism in the United States, it illuminates transcolonial circuits of a curiously shared revolutionary project. Rather than simply offer a historical account of those interconnections, it theorizes a practice of reading revolutionary violence as perpetual, repetitive haunting, a politics of the undead. It argues for a historiographical live burial by which violences of the past reappear to disrupt the imperial promise of futurity and continuity. From the 1916 “Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial” in San Francisco, during which members of the Ghadr Party—consisting of diasporic Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley, and Punjabi farmers in the Central Valley—were accused of conspiring with German diplomats to arm anticolonial revolt in British India, this essay tracks forms of radical sympathy that emerge, flourish, and stutter in an era of ethnonationalist constriction.

Public Perceptions of Moral Insanity in the 19th Century.

The diagnosis of moral insanity was primarily used through the best part of the 19th century to define and justify the psychiatric treatment of a particular type of conduct in which the patient seemed otherwise rational but displayed certain inexplicable and undesirable behaviors deemed socially perverse or "unfit." This article traces the history of this highly contested concept, which mirrors a historical arc in which psychiatry emerges as a discipline and stakes territorial claims on defining and regulating moral behavior. As illustration, I focus on the Hinchman Conspiracy Trial of 1849 as a less known case of wrongful confinement that hinged on proving the diagnosis of moral insanity in court. Moral insanity is a case study of the efforts to medicalize human ethical conduct, an effort starkly resisted by both the courts and the public. Some of the legacies of the term are the contemporary use of insanity as a legal defense, and the ability of patients to dispute psychiatric ward confinement orders in court.

A Critical Study on Korean Protestant Christian’s Participation in the Independent Movement during the Japanese Colonial Regime and the Phenomenon of Martyr-Designation/Making: Focused on the Korean Conspiracy Trial, March First Movement, and Shinto-Shrine Controversy

A Critical Study on Korean Protestant Christian’s Participation in the Independent Movement during the Japanese Colonial Regime and the Phenomenon of Martyr-Designation/Making: Focused on the Korean Conspiracy Trial, March First Movement, and Shinto-Shrine Controversy

Prometheus in Chicago: Film Portrayals of the Chaining and Gagging of Bobby Seale and the “Real-ization” of Resistance

At the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale was ordered chained and gagged after asserting the right to represent himself. This article examines film portrayals of this event to trace a lineage of resistance—its conception, its universalization, and its perpetuation across time. By melding together political and psychoanalytic approaches to cinema, I argue that film can serve to imbue Seale’s struggle with lasting relevance, bringing attention to the holes perforating power’s foundations and connecting the oppressions of the past with the oppressions of the present.

Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater by Jacqueline O’Connor (review)

Jacqueline O'Connor. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater. Theater in the Americas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 225. $40.00. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater constitutes a welcome addition to the growing body of research concerned with forms of documentation in the theater. By investigating what she calls the trial O'Connor sets out to explore complicated questions ... about law and the execution of justice, about art and the resolution of emotion (21). Through theatrical reenactment of the procedures of justice, she argues, communities of performers and spectators can symbolically re-open the cases, and can debate their cultural and social ramifications in ways legal proceedings cannot. In close readings of nine such documentary trial plays, first produced between 1970 and 2000, O'Connor deliberates and interrogates the boundaries that (often very tentatively) separate fact from fiction, the courtroom from the theater, and the individual from the social. The documentary trial play, O'Connor states in an initial definition of the genre, comes about through the blending of verbatim excerpts from legal transcripts, media coverage of the events, and first-person interviews, the last compiled either at the time of the trial or, in some cases, months or years later (4). Not all of the trial plays analyzed in the book are concerned with trials in a strictly legal sense; some also deal with judicial hearings such as the infamous congressional investigations conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era. Moreover, O'Connor's notion of the contemporary in her title is relatively broad and reaches back to the 1970s; while the trials that precede the plays even date back as far as the 1890s, the historical, political, and aesthetic territory covered by the book can be roughly delineated as the post-World War II United States. In four main chapters, O'Connor discusses nine plays and the courtroom proceedings they are based on. Importantly, she points out, documentary trial plays hardly ever focus on ordinary trials, but instead dramatize legal action in which broader cultural, social, and political issues are negotiated. In these cases, the rationality of the law is often doubtful, and reflection on it determined to a large extent by political and ideological considerations. This focus on exemplary cases also explains why at times O'Connor seems to say more about the trials themselves and their historical circumstances than about the aesthetics of the trial plays she purports to analyze. The strong emphasis on the historical bases of her theatrical archive is also evident in the larger structure of Documentary Trial Plays: its four chapters are structured along thematic lines (chapter 1 deals with Vietnam War protests, chapter 2 with the McCarthy era, and so on) rather than in terms of formal, aesthetic, or theatrical considerations. While this is not necessarily a flaw, it points to the complexities of writing about documentary art, which is so explicitly entangled with larger historical realities that it is often difficult to foreground aesthetic and production processes and decisions. In the first chapter, Judicial Identification, O'Connor examines two documentary trial plays related to illegal forms of protest against the Vietnam War: Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), about Catholic activists (of whom Berrigan was one) burning draft cards, and Ron Sossi and Frank Condon's The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1979), about protesters who refused to exit public parks during the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago. In her reading, O'Connor focuses on the relationship between law and morality, and the tricky question of the extent to which laws are reflective of moral considerations at all. How can we assess the role of the legal system, she asks, in matters of political dissent? …

Class Conflict and the Demise of the Artisan Order: The Cordwainers' 1805 Strike and 1806 Conspiracy Trial

Class Conflict and the Demise of the Artisan Order: The Cordwainers' 1805 Strike and 1806 Conspiracy Trial

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky by Elizabeth D. Leonard (review)

Reviewed by: Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky by Elizabeth D. Leonard Brian Dirck (bio) Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 432. Cloth, $40.00.) The Civil War is littered with examples of promising people who never quite lived up to expectations and eventually faded quietly into obscurity. Don Carlos Buell was supposedly destined for battlefield glory. Kate Chase's beauty and charm would never be forgotten. Schuyler Colfax would surely make a fine president someday. To be fair, by most standards, Joseph Holt was indeed a successful man; and yet few people today have ever heard of him. Scion of a wealthy Kentucky family, Holt possessed every marker for success. "He was strikingly bright, bookish, and unusually serious," Leonard writes (8). He was a talented lawyer, an excellent administrator, and on the political front possessed considerable oratorical skills that won him renown in the Democratic Party. There was even some talk of his running for the [End Page 150] presidency during the 1850s. But he steadfastly refused to stand for elective office, choosing instead a succession of appointed government posts: Kentucky state attorney, commissioner of patents, postmaster general and (very briefly) secretary of war in the Buchanan administration, and finally judge advocate general for Abraham Lincoln, a post he held until he eventually retired in 1875. Holt brought to all of these posts a consistent set of virtues, what Leonard describes as an "apparently unshakable professional integrity, and his commitment to fairness and justice" (90). In that hyperpartisan age he was known for his impartiality and incorruptibility, winning the respect of friends and foes alike. While he was a southerner and a slaveholder, he was also a thoughtful and serious critic of the peculiar institution who eventually came to embrace emancipation, a principled stance that cost him friends and family support. "When he found himself forced to choose between slavery and the Union, Holt's decision became virtually unconflicted; slavery must go," Leonard writes (67). His various jobs also gave him a front-row seat to the momentous events of the time. He witnessed the secession crisis from within President Buchanan's embattled administration, with quite a few people believing "he was a more decisive, stable, and reliable Union man than Buchanan himself " (107). As Lincoln's judge advocate general, he acted as the president's chief adviser in matters related to military justice and wartime civil liberties, and he came to admire the president, observing that Lincoln "has the courage to look traitors in the face" (146). Perhaps most dramatically (and controversially) of all, Holt played a key role in the events surrounding the Lincoln assassination, acting as the government's chief prosecutor in the trial of the Booth conspirators, a role which won him praise in some quarters but condemnation in others. He was also a bitter and outspoken critic of Andrew Johnson, who had publicly castigated Holt's actions during the Booth conspiracy trial. "No member of Abraham Lincoln's administration or the postwar federal government—indeed, no Civil War-era political figure—has been more unjustly neglected by historians, more misrepresented by Americans' collective historical 'memory,' and, in the end, more completely forgotten than Joseph Holt," Leonard argues at the beginning of Lincoln's Forgotten Ally (1-2). This reads at first like a species of hyperbole; and yet by the end of the book, Leonard builds a convincing case, pointing out that Americans' memory of Holt fell victim to the determined efforts by post-Reconstruction Americans to denigrate or obscure entirely the contributions of passionate pro-Union and proemancipation men like Holt. Still, to her credit Leonard does not let her advocacy sink into hagiography. She forthrightly [End Page 151] exposes Holt's flaws: his tendency to hold grudges, his "inclination toward dark moods," his thin-skinned sensitivity to slights (real and imagined), and his occasional neglect of family life while pursuing his professional career (35). One suspects that Holt's internal struggles with the morality of slavery mirrored that of many other Americans, and therein lies another strength in Lincoln...

Media Burn: What’s in a Name?

BURN IS AN EVOLVING SET OF IDEAS about effects of television and fame on personalities. I made up name in 1970 during Chicago Conspiracy Trial (aka the Chicago 10, or 8, or 7). It was my first exposure on a daily basis to who were not on TV or in movies. There were no cameras in courtroom. I was reporting every day on phone (radio to Pacifica and local Chicago stations). The differences between experience in courtroom and how principals performed on TV news conferences every day and night were remarkable. I was struck by how being on camera and seen on TV affected ongoing behavior of characters. Included in Chicago Eight were defendants Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner. Their lawyers, Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, were also primary characters whose personas were affected by appearing on TV. Judge Julius Hoffman appeared on TV. The defendants, particularly Abbie Hoffman, were keenly aware that public perception of trial was determined by TV, and Hoffman did everything he could to make judge object of ridicule. One day, immediately after a recess, when an undercover policeman had given potentially damaging testimony about intent of defendants, Abbie stood on his head on defendants' table. Of course, that was courtroom sketch that was used that night on TV, an image that essentially obliterated testimony reported on television. For nearly six months straight, usually five days a week, I was in courtroom and close to media circus, as it was described on television news every day and night. I constantly discussed our ideas about this new form of spectacle with my friend John Schultz, author and world's expert on events of Chicago 1968 and trial, who wrote No One Was Killed and Motion Will Be Denied. With John's encouragement, I developed and articulated first concept of Media Burn in 1971: BURN: A NEW CONCEPT-No doubt, lots of people have felt this way many times in history, but we have now arrived at a point where what's REAL is only if it's on TV. This trial has been most emotional and political watershed in my lifetime. I have been one of about 100 people who saw it live-or ever will. Yet images and impact created here have constant consciousness of millions as a new episode plays out on TV every night for all these months . . . despite fact that there were no cameras. What's TV and what's real about it? Who these people are, what they represent, their guilt for these charges based on an insane conspiracy law, are all far less important to me than who they become and how world finds out about them by seeing them only on TV. This is something new. They aren't elected officials or TV game show hosts, newscasters or paid performers. They are stand-ins for our generation, for our beliefs, hopes and antiestablishment identities. Because of this process of being on TV, they have become genuine celebrities. The distinctive nature of their fame as it has been generated by TV has a direct effect on who they are and how they behave, both on camera and in courtroom and ultimately on their personalities and lives. Defining, examining and understanding process is what I have termed MEDIA BURN. (Weinberg 1) Almost immediately after Chicago Conspiracy Trial, tools of portable video suddenly became available, and power to show celebrities and characters on television and video shifted from corporate to individual and artistic. In early 1970s, we used first tools of portable video and discovered how phenomenon of being videotaped involved a lack of inhibition resulting in powerful self-fascination that is triggered and enhanced by appearing on-screen. An early example took place in 1972, in The World's Largest Television Studio by TVTV (the first portable video ever broadcast on TV). …

Quelling Dissent

In 1935, the state of California convicted eight Communist organizers of criminal syndicalism and sent them to prison. This article argues that the Sacramento conspiracy trial of farm labor organizers shows how California growers and their allies in state and local government used the fear of Communism as a cudgel to beat back New Deal challenges to their power. The growers generated a Red Scare to help them maintain their control over workers and wages at a time when they felt threatened by the federal government’s new interest in workers’ rights.

The Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators

For President Abraham Lincoln, things looked brighter on Friday, April 14, 1865 than they had for a long time. Five days earlier, General Robert E. Lee effectively ended the long nightmare of the Civil War by surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia, and just the previous day, the city of Washington celebrated the war's end by illuminating every one of its public building with candles. Candles also burned in most private homes, causing a city paper to describe the nation's capital as all ablaze with glory. The President decided he could finally afford an evening of relaxation: he would attend a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in downtown Washington. On May 1, 1865, President Johnson issued an order that the alleged conspirators be tried before a nine-person military commission. Testimony began in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial on May 12, just three days after the prisoners were first asked if they would like to have legal counsel. The rules of the Commission made the position of the defendants even more grave: conviction could come on a simple majority vote and a majority of two-thirds could impose the death sentence. Over the course of the next seven weeks, the Commission would hear from 361 witnesses. As the witnesses paraded to the stand, spectators lucky enough to get admission passes from Major General Hunter would move in and out of the nonchalant atmosphere of the courtroom.

Theater in the Courtroom

In this article, the author situates the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in its historical context and explores its relevance to the jurisprudence of political trials and to theories of the theater. She begins by applying the theoretical framework of theater and contrasting two scenes from the trial. One falls into the category of rough theater, and the other into the category of deadly theater. There follows an analysis of the major scene of the first act, the binding and gagging of defendant Bobby Seale, and a scene close to the end of the trial when two defendants appeared in court wearing judicial robes. Finally, the article addresses how subsequent courts related to and reacted to these extraordinary events.