Editor’s Note: In 1987, as a correspondent for In These Times, I covered a trial held in Northampton, Mass., where a jury acquitted 15 defendants, including Abbie Hoffman, the 50-year-old rabble rouser, and Amy Carter, former President Jimmy Carter’s 19-year-old daughter, of trespassing and disorderly conduct charges stemming from a Nov. 25, 1986 protest at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, attempting to halt CIA recruitment on campus.

The trial, held 17 years after the Chicago Seven trial in Chicago had ended in February of 1970, also featured Leonard Weinglass as a defense attorney. Here is an excerpt from that story.

NORTHAMPTON, MASS. – Six jurors – four women and two men, the youngest 34, the oldest 77 – recently did what Congress has never found the courage or backbone to do: find the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency guilty of violating national and international law in its covert activities supporting the contras in Nicaragua.

On April 15, after an eight-day trial, the jury acquitted 15 defendants – including Abbie Hoffman, the 50-year-old rabble-rouser, and Amy Carter, former President Jimmy Carter's 19-year-old daughter – of trespassing and disorderly conduct charges stemming from a Nov. 25, 1986, protest at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst attempting to halt CIA recruitment on campus.

The defendants argued successfully under the necessity defense permitted in Massachusetts law that the crimes they committed were of far lesser harm than the crimes being committed by the CIA in Central America.

The defense strategy was to put the CIA on trial, and to that aim they assembled an impressive array of expert witnesses to testify about CIA misdeeds: Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general from 1967-69; Daniel Ellsberg, disseminator of the Pentagon Papers; Ralph McGehee, former director of covert operations for the CIA; Edgar Chamorro, a Nicaraguan paid by the CIA to pose as a “moderate” front man for the contras; Howard Zinn, political science professor at Boston University and an expert on social movements and civil disobedience; Morton Halperin, former consultant to the National Security Council; and Francis Boyle, professor of law at the University of Illinois and an expert in international law.

“This was not a defense; this was a prosecution!” said Leonard Weinglass, lead defense attorney, addressing a crowd of cheering supporters with a bullhorn from the courthouse steps moments after the verdict was announced.

Middle America’s verdict
District Attorney W. Michael Ryan, Jr., whose office prosecuted the case, said he was shocked by the verdict. “It was a great jury, it was a conservative jury. The moment they were empaneled I thought we had it won,” he told reporters afterward. “I think they [the jury] were just overwhelmed by what they heard. Apparently, Middle America doesn't want the CIA doing what they are doing.”

Seventy-seven-year-old juror Walter La Freniere, explaining his reasons for acquitting the defendants, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette: “It’s not up to the CIA to start wars and murder.”

Juror Anne Gaffney, a 64-year-old clerk with the U.S. Veterans Administration, praised the defendants. “These young people,” she told the Gazette, “are doing what perhaps most of us should be doing, but we don't have time to.”

Although presiding District Court Judge Richard F. Connon said afterward that he believed no lasting precedent had been set and University of Massachusetts Chancellor Joseph Duffey said the ruling would have no impact on the school’s policy regarding demonstrators, the trial’s significance goes beyond what defense lawyer Thomas Lesser of Northampton called “the first major victory of the necessity defense” in the “most important political trial of the decade.”

Connecting the threads
The trial connected the political threads of social action, nonviolence and student protest running through the last four decades and tied them together with the current outcry against Reagan administration policy in Central America. The trial’s transcript may serve not only as a textbook for trial lawyers handling similar “necessity defense” cases, but will also prove an historic document – a testament to the forces of social change.

So much came full circle in this trial:

• The trial was held in Northampton, Mass., home of Calvin Coolidge, who as president in 1926 sent the U.S. Marines to Nicaragua to quell a “peasant uprising.” In an even more delicious ironic twist, Coolidge, whose legend is celebrated by a monument right outside the stone courthouse, once served as the clerk of courts in the same courtroom where the jury returned its not-guilty verdict. “There are a lot of ghosts here,” said District Attorney Ryan, surveying the courtroom during recess one afternoon.

• In 1969 former U.S, Attorney General Ramsey Clark had been prevented from testifying by Judge Julius Hoffman in the infamous conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, where Abbie Hoffman was one of the defendants charged with crossing state lines to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Leonard Weinglass was one of the attorneys defending him, Now, 18 years later, they were all together in court again – Hoffman the defendant, Weinglass the defense lawyer and Clark finally on the witness stand.

So it was poignant when Clark, responding to a question by Assistant District Attorney Diane Fernald about whether an action had to be illegal in order to have an effect in changing public policy, replied: “I believe that if Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King. It took that kind of dramatic action to awaken this nation to its flaw of racism.”

• It was even more poignant when former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg explained to the jury his reasons for copying the then-secret study of the Vietnam War that later became known as the Pentagon Papers. The catalyst, Ellsberg testified, had been his meeting in 1969 with Randall Kehler, a war resister on his way to prison, who had chosen to go to jail rather than cooperate with the draft board.

Kehler’s stance floored Ellsberg, making him ask this question of himself: what can I do nonviolently, truthfully, to help end this war? And “Do I, Daniel Ellsberg, have a right to be silent because I’ve been ordered to be silent?”

A few weeks later Ellsberg decided to copy the Pentagon Papers and given them to Sen. William Fulbright [D-Ark.], who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, knowing full well that act might result in his spending the rest of his life in jail. [Kehler; who now lives in Colrain, Mass., 20 miles from Northampton, went on to become the founding director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.]

As for what the Reagan administration and the CIA are doing in Central America, Ellsberg said: “There is an uncanny resemblance – a feeling I am reliving the experience of what happened in Vietnam,” where the American public is being misled about the government's real intentions. “I believe the planning processes (for Vietnam and Nicaragua) are almost identical,” he testified. “I believe we are moving toward direct combat involvement.

• Abbie Hoffman, an elder statesman of campus radicalism, had little inhibition about courting the news media. He grabbed every opportunity to get his message across.

Hoffman represented himself at the trial, which at times seemed a bad decision. He fumbled badly, for example, when examining defense witness Dr. Paul Epstein, a Boston, Mass., physician who visited Nicaragua in 1983 and 1987. The prosecution kept objecting as Hoffman failed to ask questions in a proper legal fashion. Finally, the judge intervened, rephrasing the questions so as to get through the testimony.

Most of Hoffman’s closing statement was stricken by the judge, who ruled that his argument were not relevant to the trial. But the closing contained Hoffman’s most memorable turn of phrase. We do not have a problem “with the CIA gathering intelligence,” he told the jury. “This country needs intelligence,” he said with a straight face.