◆ SpookStack

ABBOTT H. HOFFMAN “of preparing the kind of defense that woula last 24-3 months at a cost of like a quarter of a million dollars, you know, and tremendous agony and taxing on terms of the witnesses and getting it all together trying to defend ourselves against a crime that we didn't understand even the nature of it. This was the first law that the Federal Government ever passed legislating against a state of mind. We were charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with the intention to incite a riot. With the intention! A riot is defined by an act or a threat of violence by one or more people in a crowd of three or more. <A conspiracy is defined as an overt conspiracy of the mind, so the people would never have 7 to meet, which in fact many of us hadn't done. We hadda be intro- eS duced the first day of the trial! So a lotta people have a highly misconceived notion what the trial was about. I was a witness in the trial. Two books that I wrote were used as evidence against be me. That's the first time that books have ever been used against — a defendant in America except for like an obscenity trial, which — L =. this probably was because our language was on trial. Every, uh... a fuck, fuck was four years man. Come out in the testimony and the, 2 uh, you know the jurors from white, from suburbs, you know, old ad ladies who like to watch soap operas. I mean, who the fuck else see gonna sit on a jury? I mean, first of all, they only choose from the voter registration list. You know, that eliminates 45 percent of the country. Probably everybody in this room that eliminates 19