Not content with the bombing convictions, the government indicted the Ohio 7 for seditious conspiracy and RICO — putting their politics themselves on trial in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1989, in the last major sedition prosecution of the century. Levasseur defended himself, turning the ten-month trial into a history of the prison movement, apartheid, and Central America; the jury acquitted him and Pat Gros outright, and hung for the remaining defendants, after which the government abandoned the case — a multi-million-dollar defeat widely compared to the failed 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial.
The verdict stands as the era's clearest jury repudiation of prosecuting revolutionaries for their beliefs. Kazi Toure, tried separately, had become the only Black man convicted of sedition in U.S. history — a distinction his supporters wielded in the campaign that won his 1991 release.