Goodwin also handled the Grand Jury which indicted eight Seattle radicals last August in connection with a ROTC demonstration at the University of Washington in May, during which type writers, projectors, and other classroom equipment were destroyed. This second group-which included two of the Seattle 8-was charged with "aiding and abetting, counseling and procuring, inciting and inducing each other and others to damage federal property." Their trial is scheduled for this May.

At the trial, Pitkin portrayed the defendants as violent revolutionaries who had duped "a lot of good faith demonstrators." He played heavily on the theme of the defendants as outside agitators.

According to Pitkin, one of the defendants told a group in Seattle that, after seeing a television news account of a demonstration in Seattle, "we decided this was the place to make things happen, so we jumped in the car and headed for Seattle."

Pitkin emphasized that the defendants had become involved in the formation of the Seattle Liberation Front-a coalition of radicals living in collectives in Seattle-very soon after their arrival in Seattle.

The SLF set up free stores for laid-off Boeing workers' and provided coffee and donuts, as well as literature, for people in line at Seattle's unemployment offices. And the group was circulating a petition in Seattle calling for a tax reform which would eliminate taxes for working people and shift them to corporations.

Several of the defendants charged that they were being prosecuted mainly because of the active role they played in the SLF.

At the trial, Pitkin read the entire Fourteen Point program of the SLF to the jury. The program includes directives to "create revolutionary culture everywhere, fight American imperialism through continual actions that disrupt the business-as-usual fabric of American life, destroy the university unless it serves the people, protect and expand the drug culture." Nothing in the program proved that the defendants were conspiring to destroy federal property or incite a riot, but these four points might very well frighten the jury.

A defendant allegedly called for "an attack on the American judicial system." The strongest statement Pitkin attributes to the defendants, before the day of the demonstration, is this: "We're not going to picket, we're going to shut that Court House down by any means necessary." The defendant he attributed it to denied making this statement on the grounds that he never says "by any means necessary."

It seems probable that no conspiracy existed. If the government knew this, then it can hardly argue that its motivation in seeking the indictments was is desire to see crime punished. Other possible motives exist: the government's desire to punish, or harass, or discredit those politically opposed to it. That it acted out of such motives does not seem implausible.

Sabotage in St. Louis

In St. Louis, there is less evidence that the government is acting in bad faith. Last May 4, several thousand demonstrators at Washington University in St. Louis marched to the Air Force ROTC building, which some of the demonstrators entered and lit on fire. When firemen came to put out the fire, the demonstrators, chanting "Kent State, Kent State," tried to push them back, even when the firemen came accompanied by the police.

The U.S. Attorney's office in St. Louis quickly convened a federal Grand Jury to investigate the May 4 incident because of the "myriad of possible offenses involved," Daniel Bartlett, Jr., U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, stated recently.

Bartlett said that it was his office's policy to prosecute any known criminal and that in this, as in every case, evidence that a crime had been committed led "automatically" to action by his office.

He did say that his office had consulted with the Justice Department during every phase of the grand jury proceedings-which is more than it consults with Washington usually. It had done so, he said, because of the Justice Department's interest in the laws that were involved. He noted that an Internal Security Division lawyer from Washington had observed the last part of the Grand Jury investigation.

The Grand Jury in St. Louis indicted four students on charges of sabotage or attempted sabotage during a time of National Emergency; one was also charged with destruction of federal property. Three other students were charged with violating an antiriot provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

The provision, known as the Civil Obedience Act of 1968, makes it a federal crime to obstruct law enforcement officers or firemen doing their lawful duty in connection with a civil disorder which obstructs a federally-protected function.