Abstract
In the 1960s and early 1970s deviance research, especially in the labeling perspective, was concerned with the question of how individuals or groups become defined as deviant. Since then, the political analysis of deviance has come to ask the more fundamental question of how deviance becomes constructed through political processes. A political trial is one particularly transparent situation in which narrower political processes for imputing deviance elicit more fundamental interpretations of political modes of deviance construction. In order to explore the workings of the deviance construction process, the present study examines the two defense strategies employed on behalf of the defendants in the trial of the Chicago 15, a group of thirteen men and two women who destroyed selective service files on the south side of Chicago in May, 1969. The first strategy is the previously studied “motivation defense,” wherein the moral righteousness of the defendants' purpose is pleaded as cause for their exculpation. The second is the unique “cultural insanity defense,” which asserts that the defendants were so profoundly deluded in their moral indictment of the government that the jury should return a verdict of culturally insane rather than criminally guilty. The first section of the paper summarizes the circumstances of the trial. The second and third sections analyze each of the two defense strategies, focusing on their legal and political logic and on the prosecution counter-strategies they engendered. The final section indicates a number of theoretical implications for the further development of the political model of political trials and of deviance construction in society at large.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bannan, John F., and Rosemary S. Bannan 1974 Law, Morality, and Vietnam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barkan, Steven E. 1977 “Political trials and thepro se defendant in the adversary system.” Social Problems 25:324–336.
—— 1980 “Political trials and resource mobilization: Towards an understanding of social movement litigation.” Social Forces 58:945–961.
Becker, Theodore L., ed. 1971 Political Trials: New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Berrigan, Daniel 1970 The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. Boston: Beacon Press.
Burawoy, Michael 1981 “Terrains of contest: Factory and state under capitalism and socialism.” Socialist Review 58:83–125.
Clavir, Judy, and John Spitzer, eds. 1970 The Conspiracy Trial. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Danelski, David J. 1971 “The Chicago conspiracy trial.” Pp. 134–180 in Theodore L. Becker (ed.), Political Trial. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Duster, Troy 1970 The Legislation of Morality: Law, Drugs, and Moral Judgement. New York: The Free Press.
Gray, Francine du Plessix 1970 “The ultra resistence.” In Trials of the Resistence. New York: The New York Review.
Gusfield, Joseph R. 1963 Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
—— 1967 “Moral passage: The symbolic process in public designations of deviance.” Social Problems 15:175–188.
Hakman, Nathan 1972 “Political trials in the legal order: A political scientist's perspective.” Journal of Public Law 21:73–126.
Hall, Robert T. 1971 The Morality of Civil Disobedience. New York: Harper and Row.
Horowitz, I.L., and Liebowitz, M. 1968 “Societal deviance and political marginality: Toward a redefinition of the relation between sociology and politics.” Social Problems 15:280–96.
Kirchheimer, Otto 1961 Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lauderdale, Pat and James Inverarity 1980 “From apolitical to political analyses of deviance.” Pp. 15–44 in Pat Lauderdale (ed.), A Political Analysis of Deviance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lukas, Anthony 1970 The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. New York: Harper and Row.
Mitford, Jessica 1969 The Trial of Dr. Spock. New York: Knopf.
Moran, Richard 1981 Knowing Right From Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughtan. New York: The Free Press.
Parker, Jerry and Pat Lauderdale 1980 “Political deviance in courtroom settings.” Pp. 47–72 in Pat Lauderdale (ed.), A Political Analysis of Deviance. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Royko, Mike 1970 “Four who burned draft records just as sane as the rest of us.” Chicago Daily News (May 26).
Schervish, Paul G. 1973 “The labeling perspective: Its bias and potential in the study of political deviance.” The American Sociologist, 8:47–57.
Schur, Edwin M. 1965 Crimes Without Victims. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Sobel, Raymond and Ardis Ingalls 1968 “Resistance to treatment: Explorations of the patient's sick role.” Pp. 324–34 in Stephan P. Spitzer and Norman K. Denzin (eds.), The Mental Patient: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Spector, Malcolm and Kitsuse, John I. 1977 Constructing Social Problems. Menlo Park: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company.
Sternberg, David 1972 “The new radical-criminal trials: A step toward a class-for-itself in the American proletariat?” Science and Society, 36:274–301.
Sutherland, Edwin H. and Donald R. Cressey 1970 Criminology. Eighth edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Sykes, Gresham M. 1967 Crime and Society. Second edition. New York: Random House.
Sykes, Gresham M. and David Matza 1957 “Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency.” American Sociological Review, 22:664–70.
Thompson, E.P. 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
Transcript 1970 United States of America v. Frederick Joseph Chase et al. 69CR364 U.S.D.C. (N.D., Ill., E.D.) [United States District Court (Northern District, Illinois, Eastern Division.)]
Turk, A. T. 1966 “Conflict and criminality.” American Sociological Review, 31:338–52.
Van Dyke, Jon M. 1970 “The jury as a political institution.” The Center Magazine, 3:17–26.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
I would like to thank John Donovan for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Julie Zappia and Beth Cataldo for their assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schervish, P.G. Political trials and the social construction of deviance. Qual Sociol 7, 195–216 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987311
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987311