Judge Hoffman went on to preside over many more trials, including the 1974 case of the alleged Nazi collaborator Frank Walus, a retired autoworker and Polish immigrant accused by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. (Walus’s conviction was overturned, and the government never retried him.)
CHICAGO — R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago is set to kick off in August after a judge on Tuesday denied a request to postpone it by three months.
Under a quirk of federal law, the immigration courts are wholly controlled by the Justice Department, including the judges being employees overseen by the attorney general. The agency’s courts branch is called the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
“Usage of cameras or recording devices in courtrooms or other EOIR space is prohibited,” the officer wrote. “Usage of electronic devices to make a record-audio or written transcription-of the proceedings is prohibited.
From then on, the Chicago Seven and even their Who’s Who of defense witnesses — including Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Norman Mailer, Arlo Guthrie, and Judy Collins — couldn’t testify without the judge interjecting. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also forbade the singers from performing their songs on the stand.)
In his last year on the bench, lawyers accused Hoffman of being inconsistent and abusive. When he refused to retire, he was effectively sidelined by an executive committee and received no new cases. Until the end, Judge Hoffman was unrepentant about his behavior during the Chicago Seven trial.
But contrary to the film, Judge Hoffman saved all of his contempt charges for after the jury went to deliberate. He issued 159 citations to the defendants and their lawyers for everything from not rising for him and using profanity to questioning the integrity of the court.
Diminutive and a dapper dresser, Hoffman showed his bias from the start of the protesters’ trial. He held four defense lawyers (who had withdrawn from the case before it even started) in contempt and jailed two of them.
Up until that point, his most newsworthy cases had been the 1960 trial of alleged Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo, who was charged with tax evasion; a 1966 fraud case involving a supposed cancer miracle cure; and a 1968 case in which Hoffman handed down Illinois’s first federal-court school-desegregation order.
In fact, during the five-month-long trial, the defendants spent hours at the defense table eating jelly beans, making faces and editorial comments, telling jokes, reading newspapers, and sleeping.
The Seventh Circuit reversed all of the convictions in 1972, ruling that the judge’s “deprecatory and often antagonistic attitude toward the defense is evident in the record from the very beginning. It appears in remarks and actions both in the presence and absence of the jury.”.