Extremists Acquitted

The trial was marked by vociferous disruptions from the two defendants --shouted insults at the judge and militant denunciations of the whole U.S. judicial system. Both defendants were periodically banished from the courtroom and listened to the proceedings over loudspeakers from adjacent rooms. Yet in a U.S. district court in New York last week, Joanne Chesimard, 26, and Fred Hilton, 20, reputed members of the radical, gun-toting Black Liberation Army, were acquitted of charges that they and two companions had robbed a Bronx bank in September 1972. The jury verdict ended their second trial on the charges, after the first resulted in a hung jury (11 to 1 in favor of conviction).

This was just the latest in a long series of cases in which the Government has been notably unsuccessful in prosecuting black and white extremists. The abortive conclusion of the Chicago Seven trial in 1970, the acquittal of Bobby Scale in the Rackley case in 1971, and the acquittal of 17 of the Camden 28 in the spring of 1973--all represented prolonged, expensive Government prosecutions gone awry. In many instances, the Government case was weak.

In the Chesimard case, the prosecutor relied on the testimony of the two alleged accomplices. Mrs. Chesimard, who acted at times as her own counsel in the second trial, helped to show in cross-examination that their testimony was vulnerably self-contradictory. Based on the evidence presented in court, the prosecution's case was not strong.

Yet the extremists are not out of the woods. Mrs. Chesimard remained jailed on charges of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in a Shootout in May 1973; she is also accused of robbing another bank, in Queens, in 1971. Hilton has been accused of attempted murder in the shooting of two Housing Authority policemen in 1973. The Black Liberation Army is estimated to have at most 25 to 30 members. Several have been killed or captured in police shootouts, and the rest are under heavy surveillance.

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