COMMUNISTS: The Penalty

The eleven convicted top U.S. Communists stood up before Federal Judge Harold R. Medina to be sentenced. For conspiring to teach and advocate forceful overthrow of the U.S. Government, ten of the eleven were sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine each. The eleventh got a $10,000 fine and three years in prison. Robert Thompson, New York state chairman of the party, had gotten a lighter sentence because of his war record: he won the Distinguished Service Cross in New Guinea for swimming a swollen river under fire and, with his platoon, wiping out two pillboxes. Comrade Thompson was not exactly grateful for the favor. “Judge Medina attempted with a last-minute two-bit maneuver to cloak his vicious class role with a whitewash of judicial fairness,” Thompson complained later. “I take no pleasure that this Wall Street judicial flunky has seen fit to equate my possession of the D.S.C. with two years in prison.”

When the last defendant had been sentenced, lawyers got to their feet to make an impassioned plea for bail pending appeal. Judge Medina rejected their plea, ordered the convicted men jailed in Manhattan’s federal detention headquarters until the U.S. Attorney General selected the prison where they would serve their sentences. Handcuffed and flanked by a bevy of U.S. marshals, the eleven Communists were carted off to jail, a former garage, while the long and tortuous process of their appeal began.

The Communists had hardly settled in their cells when they acquired neighbors who also look to Moscow. Five officials of the Amtorg Trading Corp., Soviet Russia’s commercial arm in the U.S., were installed temporarily in the federal jail until they raised $15,000 bail apiece. Amtorg, which calls itself a private corporation, was indicted for failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Russians (and a sixth who is in Russia) were indicted for their part in the firm’s refusal to sign up.