Word: apalachin
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...November of 1957, sixty-three men met in the home of one Joseph Barbara in the village of Apalachin, New York; the conclave, raided by the State police, was widely assumed to have been a gangland convention. Almost two years later, twenty of these men were tried in a United States District Court on a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. In the course of the trial, the prosecution was unable even to tell what had transpired at the Apalachin meeting. But the public obviously wanted to see the defendants in jail; the jury returned a verdict of guilty...
...Federal Court of Appeals has re-examined the case and has wisely decided to reverse the convictions. Much as society may want to put known criminals behind bars, the evidence in the Apalachin case plainly did not warrant conviction on the admittedly trumped-up count of conspiracy. The Appeals Court decision is a welcome indication that the judiciary is still ready to reassert the rule of law over the public's desire to "get" a group of people it regards as undesirable...
...authorities cannot prove their case against the Apalachin group on the basis of its real crimes, it is better to let nineteen guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. The Court of Appeals has shown both wisdom and courage in restating the principle that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The law protects the criminal as well as the citizen--and it must continue to do so, even if some clever gangsters must go free in the process...
Last week, in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, a jury found 20 of Barbara's racketeer-guests guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to grand juries about their reasons for coming to Apalachin.* Facing them in mid-January: maximum sentences of five years and/or $10,000 fines. In what U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers hailed as a "landmark" verdict, the Government in an ingeniously based prosecution won its biggest courtroom victory against organized crime since the conviction of Al Capone. For without proving that the defendants had assembled for a "crime convention," youthful (36) Special...
...their similarity they clearly proved a conspiracy to thwart the law in a reasonable inquiry. In the early afternoon of Nov. 14, 1957, he contended, the racketeers spotted police around Barbara's place and promptly put together their common alibi; each just happened to be driving through Apalachin (from as far away as Los Angeles or Dallas or Cleveland) and just happened to drop in on ailing Pal Joe Barbara...