Biography
Daniel Crawford was one of the Fort Worth Five, five Irish-American men jailed in Texas in 1972 for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Irish Republican Army gun-running. The grand jury, sitting in Fort Worth, was probing an alleged scheme to buy weapons in the United States and ship them to the IRA in Northern Ireland. Granted immunity and ordered to testify, Daniel Crawford and his four co-resisters refused, regarding the grand jury as an instrument of political repression against Irish republican solidarity. They were jailed for civil contempt in mid-1972 and held without bail at the Federal Correctional Institution at Seagoville, near Dallas, until their release in September 1972, when they were greeted by relatives and Irish bagpipers at LaGuardia Airport in New York. The case became a cause celebre for Irish-American and civil-liberties supporters opposed to the use of grand juries to investigate political associations.