Biography
Maurice L. Braverman was a Baltimore labor and civil-liberties lawyer who became one of the most prominent legal-aid attorneys in Maryland after his Smith Act conviction was reversed and his bar membership was finally restored. Indicted with five other Baltimore-area Communists in 1951 (the Frankfeld case), he was convicted at trial in 1952 and sentenced to three years in federal prison; the Maryland Court of Appeals disbarred him on the basis of the conviction. He served his sentence — much of it at the federal prison camp at Allenwood, Pennsylvania — and was released in 1955. After Yates v. United States in 1957 the underlying conviction was effectively erased, but the Maryland bar refused to readmit him for another seventeen years. He was finally readmitted in 1974, became one of the founders of the Maryland Legal Aid Bureaus expansion into rural counties, and practiced civil-rights and prisoners-rights law in Baltimore until his death in 2003.
The National Guardian’s May 8, 1952 report describes Maurice Braverman’s unsuccessful request to sever his Smith Act case from those of five other defendants. It summarizes his argument that the alleged acts attributed to him consisted of association arising from his work as an attorney, and his reported inability to obtain separate counsel despite approaching Baltimore lawyers and the city bar association. These are his attributed defense arguments and contemporary legal circumstances, not a new custody event or a later court finding.
Contemporary legal-defense report, National Guardian, May 8, 1952, page 3.
