Outrage in Chicago

The following letter, in condensed version, was sent to the New York Times by the editor of Dissent:

TO THE EDITOR:

It is hard to speak of the Chicago trial with anything but bitterness. What occurred there was not merely a juridical burlesque, but a moral disgrace. And for anyone who cares about the future of the American young, it was a political disaster.

Consider the sequence of events: an indictment on charges of “conspiracy,” which by its very nature is juridically imprecise and factually dubious, and of crossing a state line with intent to incite a riot, which by its very nature is utterly vague and perhaps unconstitutional; a trial in which the presiding judge behaved in...