Weeks after Riggs's death, federal prosecutors indicted Albizu Campos and seven other Party leaders for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government in Puerto Rico. A first jury with a Puerto Rican majority hung; the U.S. attorney then hand-picked a second jury with an American majority, which convicted in July 1936. Albizu received ten years, served first at La Princesa in San Juan and then in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
The trial — prosecuted under the same seditious-conspiracy statute later used against the FALN and Macheteros generations — removed the Party's entire leadership at a stroke and made Albizu a hemispheric symbol. He would spend most of the rest of his life imprisoned, and his absence hung over every event that followed, from Ponce to Jayuya.