Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle over Who Decides What We Eat by Gumpert David E

Author:Gumpert, David E. [Gumpert, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603584050
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2013-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

In 1969, seven anti–Vietnam War activists—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden among them—were put on trial in U.S. federal court on charges they helped incite riots outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when police beat demonstrators protesting the war.

In the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1960s, the trial of the Chicago Seven, as they came to be known, turned into a political carnival. It stretched for months, with celebrities testifying—singers Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie, writers Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, and activists Timothy Leary and Reverend Jesse Jackson. Demonstrators marched frequently outside the courthouse. Hoffman and Rubin, in particular, had an eye for the sensational—and one day arrived in court dressed in judicial robes. They complied when the judge ordered them to remove the robes, and compounded the joke by having Chicago police uniforms underneath. Hoffman blew kisses at the jury.

Five of the defendants were found guilty; they were sentenced to five years in jail and fined five thousand dollars. (At the sentencing, Jerry Rubin offered the judge LSD.) The guilty verdict was eventually overturned on appeal, and the U.S. Justice Department decided not to retry the activists.1

It’s doubtful such a trial could occur today. The 1960s were a time when the American justice system was seen as giving too many rights to the accused—“coddling criminals” as some critics put it at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court had, just three years earlier in the Miranda case, ruled that police must, upon arrest, warn suspects of their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present when they are questioned. At the time, many law enforcement professionals viewed the decision as potentially a major handicap to law enforcement, since evidence could be thrown out if suspects were questioned without a warning of their Miranda rights.

Prosecutors and politicians learned important lessons from the Chicago Seven trial about how activists can use the legal system to leverage political causes. They also learned how to adapt to the Miranda decision, especially as crime increased during the 1970s and 1980s. Toughening punishment for lawbreakers even became a major issue in a presidential race; in 1988, George H. W. Bush ran television ads accusing his Democratic rival, Michael Dukakis, of failing to effectively punish serious offenders because Massachusetts had allowed a convicted murderer, Willie Horton, to participate in a weekend furlough program while Dukakis was governor (Horton committed a robbery and rape while out on furlough). The matter put Dukakis on the defensive and was an important factor in helping Bush defeat him.

The American legal system was toughened via thousands of new laws and mandatory sentencing for certain drug and violent crime offenses. By the first decade of the new century, the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, had nearly 25 percent of its prisoners—more total prisoners by far than any other country, including China. Whereas the United States had forty thousand people imprisoned for drug offenses in 1980, twenty-five years later the number had soared to nearly half a million.

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