Free Speech or Conspiracy?

On the screen in black and white with the sound track of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze," the line of young men one after another touched their draft cards to a flickering candle. After watching the cards blaze down to finger-burning remains, they dropped the charred stubs in a silver bowl and shook hands with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Shown in a darkened Boston federal courtroom last week, the TV newsreel was offered by a federal prosecutor as part of the evidence against Yale Chaplain Coffin, 43, Pediatrician Benjamin Spock, 65, and three codefendants, all charged with conspiracy.

In presenting its case to the all-male jury, the prosecution charged that the five conspired "to unlawfully, knowingly and willfully counsel, aid and abet" young Americans in evading the draft. Lawyers for the defense answered the charges with the argument that the free-speech guarantee of the First Amendment shielded their clients from prosecution.

News Releases & Handbills. The Government's massive and well-organized evidence was presented to the jury by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Wall, 32, a former paratrooper and Army intelligence officer. In addition to snowing several film clips, Wall read militant handbills and news releases issued by the defendants, bearing such titles as "Civil Disobedience Against the War" and "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority." Wall challenged the defendants' not-guilty pleas by quoting Dr. Spock, who in December had told FBI men: "I'm well aware that I could wind up in jail because of my illegal activities."

The jury also heard Assistant Deputy U.S. Attorney General John McDonough state that Coffin, in the company of Co-Defendants Spock, Mitchell Goodman, 44, a New York writer, and Marcus Raskin, 33, a former White House disarmament aide, had delivered a briefcase filled with 356 draft cards to the Justice Department. McDonough testified that Raskin declared, "These cards are evidence of a violation of a federal law, and it is your duty to accept them." Film shot by a Boston TV crew of the draft-card-burning ceremony showed the fifth defendant, Michael Ferber, 23, a Harvard graduate student, urging his audience "to make it difficult and politically dangerous for the government to prosecute us."

Violation of Conscience. In another film, Coffin exclaimed at a New York press conference: "Let these arrests be made in churches and synagogues, that this country can see that the nation is now engaged in actions which are in violation of individual conscience." Soon after the film was shown at the court house, U.S. marshals dragged Robert A. Talmanson, 21, a convicted draft evader, from Boston's Arlington Street Unitarian-Universalist Church. A bloody melee ensued outside the church. Talmanson had gone to the church for sanctuary, an ancient tradition not legally recognized in the U.S.

The Boston trial is expected to drag on for several weeks, despite 85-year-old Judge Francis J. W. Ford's warnings to "get on with it." In another draft-related case, a Baltimore district court last week sentenced two pacifists to six years in federal prison and a third to three years for pouring duck blood on draft-board records. One of those sentenced to a six-year stretch was the Rev. Philip F. Berrigan, 44, a Roman Catholic priest.

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