The Nixon Justice Department's showpiece prosecution charged eight movement figures — Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale — with conspiring to incite the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, under the new federal anti-riot "Rap Brown law." The five-month trial before Judge Julius Hoffman became the era's defining courtroom theater, its indelible image the judge's order that Seale, who had demanded the right to defend himself, be bound and gagged in his chair before being severed from the case with a four-year contempt sentence.

The jury acquitted all defendants of conspiracy and convicted five of crossing state lines to incite riot; Judge Hoffman added contempt sentences against every defendant and both lawyers. In 1972 the Seventh Circuit reversed the convictions, citing the judge's open hostility and the FBI's surveillance of defense lawyers, and most of the contempts fell with them. The government had spent three years and made no charge stick — but the trial had meanwhile advertised, to a generation on both sides, that political dissent in America was being tried as crime.