ESPIONAGE: Guilty!

While a federal jury in Washington struggled over two million words of testimony in her turbulent trial for espionage, slim, dark-haired Judith Coplon, 28, curled up in a chair in the courthouse pressroom and chatted with newsmen. “Let’s not talk about the trial,” smiled Judy. “I’m all talked out.”

So she talked about Poets W. H. Auden and E. E. Cummings, about modern dancing, and about vacation trips—”This time last year I was in Paris.” She posed for photographers—smoothing Defense Attorney Archie Palmer’s ruffled hair, adjusting the handkerchief in his suit, looking angry, looking happy, staring pensively into the distance.

Whenever newsreel cameras and microphones appeared, Judy made the same little speech: “I’m innocent of all charges. I’m a victim of a horrible, horrible frame-up.”

Only a Verdict. When the verdict was ready (the jury was out more than 26 hours), Judy entered the courtroom at Archie’s side, her face expressionless and pale, the blue circles under her eyes showing the strain of her trial. Smiling nervously, she turned to him: “I don’t know whether I can take it or not.” Lawyer Archie was brash and noisy as ever. “Don’t worry,” he explained with fatherly concern. “It’s only a verdict.”

White-haired Judge Albert Reeves, 75, mounted the bench, and the crowded courtroom was hushed. “The defendant will rise,” intoned the marshal. “What say you, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, as to count one [espionage]?” In a firm voice the foreman replied: “Guilty.” And to count two [stealing government documents]? “Guilty.” Judy sank back, chin in hands, no longer the “simple little girl in love” that Archie Palmer called her, but the convicted spy with “the agile little Swiss-watch mind,” as the prosecution called her—a trusted employee who had used her job in the Department of Justice to steal secret FBI documents for a Russian employee of the U.N.

Archie Palmer popped into the act. He wanted the jurors polled one by one; the word “guilty” resounded 24 times through the courtroom. He wanted sentence deferred for a month. Two days earlier, in his 130-minute summation, corny Counsel Palmer had invoked St. Matthew (“Judge not, that ye be not judged”), Omar Khayyam (“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on”), Abraham Lincoln, the golden rule and George Washington Carver. Now he was abusing Shakespeare: “They’ve got their pound of flesh,” he trumpeted. “Do they want the blood with it?”

Judge Reeves coolly shut him off. As Judy and Archie left the courtroom they were surrounded by a mob of 500 people, pushing, shoving, yelling. “Let me get a look at the hussy,” demanded an old woman. “She ought to get a rope around her neck, that’s what! I was a yeomanette in the first World War,” said another.

Parting Shot. Next day, before the judge pronounced sentence, Judith Cop-Ion had her final say. She had not received a fair trial, she insisted. “I understand that I can plead for mercy. That I, will not do, because pleading for mercy would mean an admission of guilt and . . . I am innocent.” Tense but dry-eyed to the end, she sat down with one defiant parting shot: “I don’t want sympathy.”

Judge Reeves handed down his sentence: 40 months to ten years on the first count; one to three years on the second; sentences to be served concurrently, i.e., a maximum of ten years. Said the Court: “I thoroughly approve of the verdict.” Comparisons are odious, he added, but he was reminded that “one of the great soldiers of America [Benedict Arnold] betrayed his country . . . and today his name is anathema . . . Here is a young woman with infinite prospects, a great future before her . . . but she undertook to betray her country.” Judge Reeves couldn’t understand why.

Then, eying Archie Palmer sternly, he hinted that the quibbling, fulminating conduct of the defense was enough to bar Archie from ever appearing in Washington’s Federal Court again. Archie was unabashed. He and Judy flew off to Manhattan, where she faces a joint conspiracy trial next week with Valentin Gubichev. her Russian boy friend. First she wanted rest and privacy, she said. But the lure of publicity was soon too much for her: next day she obliged New York tabs by touring the Statue of Liberty for one more corny shot.