The United Freedom Front — a clandestine group of working-class radicals led by Vietnam veteran Raymond Luc Levasseur — spent a decade underground bombing courthouses and corporate offices tied to apartheid South Africa and Central America policy, actions timed to avoid casualties. Captured in 1984–85 after one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, the "Ohio 7" received long sentences for the bombings themselves; Levasseur drew forty-five years, and Tom Manning a consecutive life term for the killing of a New Jersey trooper in a traffic-stop shootout.
The government then reached for the rarest charge in the federal code: seditious conspiracy. The 1989 trial of Levasseur and others at Springfield, Massachusetts sought to criminalize the group's politics wholesale — and failed completely, ending in acquittals and a hung jury after jurors balked at punishing the same conduct twice under an ideological label. The verdict, following the failed 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial of white supremacists, effectively retired seditious conspiracy for a generation. The prisoners served on: Levasseur until 2004, Manning until his death in federal prison in 2019.