Opinion ID: 243239
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the agreement charged

Text: 7 A. The Persons Involved. The indictment charged a single conspiracy embracing the eight defendants, divers persons whose names were unknown to the Grand Jury, and some identified coconspirators: Andrew Onda, Betty Gannett, Joseph Roberts, William Z. Foster, Benjamin David, Eugene Dennis, John Gates, Gilbert Green, Gus Hall, Irving Potash, Jacob Stachel, Robert Thompson, John Williamson, Henry Winston, and Carl Winter. The role of these various defendants and named coconspirators can be appreciated only against the background of the Party hierarchy. Actually two hierarchies were involved, one state and one national, with the former responsible to the latter. By and large the defendants were involved in the state hierarchy, and the named coconspirators were involved in the national structure. Both state and national groups were overhauled in 1945 when they changed their name from political associations to parts of the Communist party; this event is the commencement of the conspiracy charged in the indictment. 8 The highest body in the reconstituted national party was the National Convention, but it met only briefly at scattered intervals. Between conventions the leadership groups, in descending order of importance, were the National Secretariat, the National Board, and the National Committee. Attached to them were various special organizations and boards. The only defendant who ever held a national post was the appellant Stone, who was a member of the New Jersey Delegation to the National Convention of 1948, an alternate member of the National Committee in 1951, and a member of the National Committee in 1953. Most of the named coconspirators held high national offices. Foster, Dennis, Davis, Gates, Green, Hall, Potash, Stachel, Thompson, Williamson, Winston, and Winter, according to testimony, were members of the National Board elected at the critical 1945 Convention. They were all indicted for violating the Smith Act and were convicted, with the exception of Foster, who was too ill to stand trial, in the original Dennis case in 1949, which was affirmed, United States v. Dennis, 2 Cir., 183 F.2d 201, and thereafter by the Supreme Court, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S.Ct. 857, 95 L.Ed. 1137. These Dennis case leaders and coconspirator Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were elected to the National Committee at the same convention. Flynn's conviction in 1952 for violating the Smith Act by conspiring with the Dennis case conspirators was affirmed in United States v. Flynn, 2 Cir., 216 F.2d 354, certiorari denied Flynn v. United States, 348 U.S. 909, 75 S.Ct. 295, 99 L.Ed. 713. 9 Coconspirator Onda was a delegate to the 1945 National Convention, where he represented the Communist Political Association in Connecticut. Coconspirator Gannett was the Assistant Organizational Secretary to the national organizational director of the Party from 1945 until at least 1950. Coconspirator Roberts was business manager of the publication The Daily Worker in 1947. 10 The Communist Party of the State of Connecticut was organized in the same fashion, with a secretariat, board, committee, and convention. The only named coconspirators active in it were Onda and Roberts. The former was the top leader of the State Party in 1945 and the latter was a District Organizer in Connecticut. Appellant Taylor (Silverman) was State Secretary from 1945 to 1950, when he became State Chairman-- a post he held at the time the indictment was returned. Appellant Ekins became State Secretary in 1950 and held that post until 1954. Appellant Goldring was a member of the State Committee at various times from 1946 through 1954, was State Financial Secretary, Treasurer, and Press Director in 1949, and was State Executive Secretary in 1954. Taylor, Ekins, and Goldring were members of the State 'concealed Board.' Appellant Dimow held local offices in Connecticut from 1946 to 1949 and was a member of the State Committee in 1953 and 1954. 11 The interconnection of the state and national officers is an important question of proof, and we shall discuss it below in that context. But the evidence of connection must be noted here, too, in defining the issue presented by the charges. As the evidence developed, the national leaders were shown to have supervised operations within the state apparatus; and various persons in the conspiracy on the national level were shown to have met other persons involved in Connecticut affairs. Thus appellant Stone, although on the national level, met appellant Taylor, a state level leader, at several meetings in Connecticut in 1952 and 1953. Stone directed the concealed activities of the Connecticut Party at a time when appellants Taylor, Ekins, and Goldring were members of a concealed State Board. Coconspirator Gannett, in the national hierarchy, appeared at a state party meeting sponsored by appellant Taylor; and a former Connecticut State Chairman served at one time as Gannett's assistant. To take one out of innumerable instances in the record of liaison between state and national organization, Nat Ross from the National Office of the Party spoke once at a State Seminar in praise of the work of Joseph Stalin. The record contains scores of names of persons who held office or taught classes for the Party between 1930 and 1955 in various parts of the United States; and the jury was invited to believe that they, too, were part of the same single national conspiracy in which the defendants engaged between 1952 and 1955. 12 The Government's contention was that the defendants were 'after-joiners' who either joined the Party after it was reconstituted or remained in it after learning the significance of its reorganizations. 3 None of the defendants participated in the 1945 reorganization of the national party, although most of the identified coconspirators were at that convention. The only defendant to participate in the Connecticut reorganization was appellant Goldring, who attended the 1945 State Convention which approved the decision of the national group and emulated it. Appellant Dimow joined the Party in 1946; the other appellants had been members of the Party long before the 1945 reorganization: Stone since 1933; Ekins since 1937; Taylor since 1939; and Goldring since 1941. 13 Normally a conspiracy indictment need not fail if proof is lacking to implicate some of the defendants or coconspirators charged. See, e.g., United States v. Cioffi, 2 Cir., 242 F.2d 473, 475, certiorari denied Cioffi v. United States, 353 U.S. 975, 77 S.Ct. 1060, 1 L.Ed.2d 1137. Under the circumstances here, however, a reversal would be necessary if the prosecution failed to prove its charge that the appellants were in league with the top echelon Communist party leaders convicted in the Dennis case. By linking the defendants with such notorious persons serious harm was done to their chances of acquittal. Whole volumes of highly inflammatory testimony about persons whom the defendants had never met were admitted into evidence on the Government's representation that these other persons would be shown to be coconspirators. Thus the statements, deeds, and aims of the top echelon national leaders were paraded before the jury; and Government witness John Lautner's career in other parts of the country between 1929 and 1950 was traced in detail-- all on the assumption that these facts were relevant to a huge national conspiracy in which the Dennis case leaders were the hub, and the Connecticut state hierarchy one of many identical spokes. These lines of testimony were neither brief nor merely cumulative nor easily forgotten. Hence the conviction cannot stand without a showing that the defendants and at least some of the persons involved in the Dennis case were part of the same conspiracy. Yates v. United States, supra, 354 U.S. 298, 77 S.Ct. 1064, 1 L.Ed.2d 1356; Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 90 L.Ed. 1557. 14 B. The Aim of the Conspiracy. We seek to define the precise aim of the conspiracy charged by the Grand Jury, mindful of the Supreme Court's recent warning that it 'will view with disfavor attempts to broaden the already pervasive and wide-sweeping nets of conspiracy prosecutions' by loose definition of conspirators' goals. Grunewald v. United States, 353 U.S. 391, 77 S.Ct. 963, 974, 1 L.Ed.2d 931. The indictment alleges an agreement to utter the kind of dangerous speech prohibited by the Smith Act. We mention this obvious fact because of the ease with which this crime may be accidentally confused with the superficially similar offense of conspiring to overthrow the Government by force and violence. The latter is forbidden by 18 U.S.C. 2383 and 2384; the present indictment concerns the Smith Act, 18 U.S.C. 2385. In this case it would not be enough to show that the defendants were serious revolutionaries who plotted to take part in a bloody insurrection; there must be a further showing of illegal speech. It is the speech element which distinguishes the Smith Act from other criminal controls on subversive activities and which has caused the Supreme Court to narrow the statutory language to avoid a construction which would violate the First Amendment. Turning then to the Smith Act, as most recently construed by the Supreme Court, it appears that there must be proof of a plan to use language reasonably calculated to incite the audience to use violence against the Government of the United States, either immediately or in the future. Yates v. United States, supra, 77 S.Ct. 1064. 15 This case, like Dennis and Yates, 'involve(s) advocacy which has already taken place, and not advocacy still to occur.' 77 S.Ct. 1064, 1079. The Government makes no claim of 'a conspiracy to engage in advocacy in the future.' 77 S.Ct. at page 1080. Its position is that the conspirators actually advocated insurrection in language of the sort condemned by Yates from 1945 until the indictment in 1955. Since the statute of limitations bars prosecution for events prior to March 4, 1952, there must ultimately be proof of criminal speech after that date. To summarize, there must be proof of three things: (1) utterances after March 4, 1952; (2) that the utterances were illegal under the standard of the Yates case; (3) that they were uttered pursuant to an understanding between the appellants and some of the persons convicted in the Dennis case.