Biography
Maia Scherrer was a Denver Communist and secretary of the Colorado defense committee, arrested under the Smith Act in August 1954 during the McCarthy era. She was released on $5,000 bail, with trial set for January 1955.
She was one of seven Colorado defendants — with Arthur Bary, Anna Bary, Harold Zepelin, Lewis Martin Johnson, Patricia Julia Blau and her husband Joseph William Scherrer — indicted in 1954 for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government under the Smith Act. All were convicted, and the convictions were fought through years of appeals in Bary v. United States (10th Cir. 1957 and 1961) as the Supreme Court’s Yates decision dismantled the Smith Act membership prosecutions.
