Biography
David Dellinger was the elder pacifist of the Chicago Eight defendants, a longtime Catholic Worker–adjacent radical pacifist who had served three years in federal prison during World War II for refusing to register for the draft. As chairman of the National Mobilization Committee against the Vietnam War he was a key planner of the 1968 Chicago demonstrations. He continued antiwar and labor organizing into his late 80s.
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.
