Biography
Abbie Hoffman was a co-founder of the Youth International Party ("Yippies") and one of the most flamboyant figures of the New Left, known for guerrilla-theater protests including the 1967 attempt to levitate the Pentagon and the disruption of the New York Stock Exchange. He was a central organizer of the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations. After conviction in the Chicago trial he later went on the run for six and a half years following an unrelated 1973 cocaine arrest, surrendering in 1980. He died by suicide in 1989.
The Chicago conspiracy trial (September 24, 1969 – February 20, 1970) prosecuted eight organizers of the demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention under the new federal anti-riot provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. The proceedings before Judge Julius Hoffman became one of the most chaotic and politically charged trials in American history. Bobby Seale's case was severed after Hoffman ordered him bound and gagged in court for demanding the right to represent himself; the remaining seven became known as the Chicago Seven. The jury acquitted all seven of conspiracy and acquitted Froines and Weiner on all charges, but convicted Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.
The defendants were arrested in March 1969, booked, and held in the Cook County Jail before posting bail in the days that followed. During the trial itself Judge Hoffman repeatedly held them in contempt and ordered them taken into custody from the courtroom — Bobby Seale most famously, but the other seven and their attorneys as well, accumulating 159 contempt citations between them. Each convicted defendant was sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, with bail pending appeal granted within weeks; the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed all the riot-act convictions in November 1972 and the contempt convictions in May 1972, and the government declined to retry, so the underlying five-year sentences were never served.
