SDS founders were at the center of the era's greatest political trial. After the police riot outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Nixon Justice Department indicted eight movement leaders — including SDS founders Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, and Bobby Seale, who was bound and gagged in the courtroom — for conspiracy to incite riot under the new Rap Brown Act. The 1969–70 circus before Judge Julius Hoffman produced convictions and scores of contempt sentences, all ultimately reversed on appeal.
By then SDS itself was gone: the June 1969 convention in Chicago shattered between Progressive Labor and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, whose Weatherman faction took the organization's name into the Days of Rage and then underground — the story continued in this section's Weather Underground pages.