The decade's armed-struggle prosecutions culminated in the Resistance Conspiracy case: six radicals — Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Alan Berkman, and Tim Blunk — charged with conspiracy in a series of symbolic bombings of government buildings, including the 1983 Capitol bombing after the Grenada invasion, in which no one was injured. Several were already serving extraordinary sentences: Rosenberg and Blunk had received fifty-eight years for possession of explosives — many times the average federal murder sentence — and Evans forty years for firearms purchases.

The women's confinement became a scandal of its own. In 1986 the Bureau of Prisons opened a High Security Unit sixty feet underground at Lexington, Kentucky — small-group isolation, constant lighting and camera surveillance, and conditions Amnesty International condemned as deliberately designed for political prisoners. A federal judge found in 1988 that assignment to the unit had been based on the women's political beliefs, and the unit was closed. The case's prisoners were among the last of the era released: Whitehorn in 1999, Rosenberg and Evans by presidential commutation in January 2001, Buck — after decades and a terminal illness — weeks before her death in 2010.