The United States Court of Appeals today dismissed the government’s case against 26 men and women charged with sedition. Among the defendants were some of the leading anti-Semites in the U.S.
The trial, which opened in 1944, was dismissed in the U.S. District Court in Washington last December on the grounds that the Justice Department had not prosecuted it diligently. The appellate court’s decision was based on the same grounds.
The defendants were formally indicted in 1942 for interfering with the draft and went on trial in April, 1944. A mistrial was declared when the presiding justice, Edward Eicher, died eight months later, with the prosecutions case still incomplete. Two years afterwards, Justice Bolitha J. Laws dismissed the case on the basis that if the prosecution could not establish the guilt of the defendants within eight months, the validity of the indictment was questionable.
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