Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 1, 1919
Sacramento, California – I. W. W. Defendants Silent Except for the Coughing
From The Liberator of February 1919:
The Silent Defense in Sacramento
By Jean Sterling
Silent Defenders
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“Do the defendants, not represented by attorneys, wish to interrogate the talesman?”
The court reporter held his pencil suspended. The forty-three defendants faced with mocking eyes and closed lips their jailers, prosecutors and the presiding judge.
“Do they wish to exercise the right of challenge?”
For a tense second the inexorable wheels of justice stopped turning. Some one had thrown a felt slipper in the cogs. The defendants gave the prospective juror not so much as a glance. They had read and yawned and gazed vacantly out of the high windows while the attorneys for the prosecution had been probing the talesman’s soul for any humane or modern ideas on the subject of labor.
Then, after a decorous silence, such as is observed in court procedures and funeral rites, the Judge said quietly, “If, then, there are no objections to the talesman, he may take his seat in the jury box.”
And so the juryman, an ancient rancher, the prophesy of the type to follow, took his seat.
And in this manner did the forty-three defendants, I. W. W.’s, now being tried in Sacramento, California, on charges of conspiracy, under the Espionage Act, open their “silent defense.”
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