The Mail POWER IN THE COURTS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

We who attended the trial of Cheyney Ryan find the account in the CRIMSON of October 31 totally inadequate. Rather than writing an essay-review of that article, let us point out some facts which were not included:

1) Members of the Harvard administration, led by Archibald Cox, made it clear that the grounds of the trespass complaint against Cheyney were political. They stated that no one knew any firm criteria for the permissible reappearance of an expelled student on campus: that previous visits by Cheyney and others had been acceptable; and therefore that it was his participation in a political struggle which had to be punished.

2) Part of the political calculus was the delay in the whole procedure. Cox did not file complaints against Cheyney and three others until about July 23, conveniently after an aroused student body had left Cambridge. (In court, he pleaded fatigue and papers to grade-a slow rate of work for a former Solicitor General.) The arresting officer testified that he was not given the warrants until September-another delay of two months. Why did Harvard not move against Cheyney earlier. We think, and the administration has offered no reply, that they waited until Cheyney enrolled in graduate school at B.U. Then they acted, both to intimidate potentially radical students by showing Harvard doesn't forget and to obstruct the political work which they feared Cheyney might do when he was again a student.

3) When Judge Viola had the courtroom cleared, Cheyney's witnesses were dragged from the witness seats; the Harvard witnesses, Deans May and Williamson and Archibald Cox, were allowed to stay. Plainclothesmen inside punched and shoved a number of the spectators, and when the latter started calling for the Harvard representatives to come out, police produced clubs and beat students out of the courthouse and down several streets.

The reason for all this was in the meanwhile becoming clear. Viola and the Harvard witnesses retired to the judge's chambers to confer for ten minutes.

The judge then reappeared and asked the prosecuting attorney, "You don't really need to make a closing argument, do you?" "No," he grinned. Viola then announced Harvard's verdict: conviction on both counts and a maximum sentence.

4) David Harnett's testimony consisted of two assertions: that on Friday morning, May 8, a large number of students were milling around University Hall, so unorganized that he declined to call it a demonstration; and that he saw Cheyney among those students at 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. Two students testified that at these times two complete chains of students with linked arms were circling the building, and two others described a meeting they attended with Cheyney which lasted past noon on Friday. Twenty other persons could have sworn to the latter point, 250 to the former. Harnett's testimony is clearly false on both points.

Cheyney affirmed in his summation that he demonstrated at Harvard on Monday, May 11, because fighting imperialism and racism can only succeed if we undertake concrete struggles against such institutions as ROTC and the CFIA and such practices as racist and sexist pay differentials. His sentence came as no surprise. The CRIMSON's article failed to convey the essence of the situation because it did not mention any of these specific instances of Harvard's exercising its power in the courts to accomplish its political ends: the preservation of the status quo for the benefit of the men who run this country.