• Transcribe
  • Translate

University of Iowa anti-war protests, 1970

1970-08-06 Daily Iowan Article: ""Defendants, City Argue Injunction""

More information
  • digital collection
  • archival collection guide
  • transcription tips
 
Saving...
DI 6/6/70 Defendants, City Argue Inunction By Lowell May DI Associate News Editor Seven of 22 defendants listed on a district courst temporary injunction appeared Wednesday in a district court hearing at the Johnson Coutny courthouse in an attempt to have their names removed form the injunction. The hearing will continue at 9 a.m. today. The seven, primarily University of Iowa students, appeared before District Court Judge Harold D.Vietor during a hearing where City Atty. Jay Honohan is asking for the city that the order be made permanent. Defendants present were Michael Seydel, Iowa City; Al Cloud, G, Iowa City; Sheri Raders, A3, Iowa City; Roland Schembari, Washington, D.C.; Sam Sloss, G, Grimes; Dan Cheeseman, Iowa City; and Bill White, A3, Cedar Rapids. The injunction which was issued May 6 by District Court Judge Robert Osmundson, came out of a week of sometimes violent disturbances that shook the university campus and the city early in May. It specifically bars the individuals and four organizations cited in it from public disruption, obstruction, destruction of property and inciting to disorder, and was designed, according to Honohan, to empower the city to make arrests against unlawful demonstrators. The organizations named on the injunction are Students for a Democratic Society, Radical Students Association, the Coalition for the Abolishment of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) and the Conspiracy. Wednesday Honohan clled a number of witnesses — university Placement Office Director Helen Barnes, Campus Security detective Lt. Kenneth Saylor, Vice-Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs Philip Hubbard and City Manager Frank Smiley — to establish the importance of disturbances, and the involvement in them by a number of the defendants and the necessity of extended use of the inunction. Honohan said that the city's concern was enjoining the "class of people" that he claims is represented by the defendants from unlawful actions in the future. The defendants, however, in cross-examining tried to assert that their individual participation in the various demonstrations — Dec. 10, April 18, May 1 and others against such alleged antagonists as the Department of Labor recruiter and ROTC — was limited and not deserving of what most of them contend is infringement of their rights. Raders and Cloud, who were represented by Iowa City lawyer Jim Hayes, testified that they had been involved in only the April 18 anti-ROTC demonstration — along with hundreds of others — and that they had already been sanctioned by the university for that involvement and had no intention to disrupt further. Saylor had previously testified that he saw Raders and Cloud at the April 18 demonstration. Both have been placed on university disciplinary probation until the end of the 1970-71 academic year. Early in the hearing Schembari made an open appeal to the Court to remove his name from the injunction. His appeal was denied. During cross-examination by Sloss, Saylor said that his security force used as evidence against alleged anti-ROTC demonstrators photographs that were supplied by a photographer hired by ROTC. He also testified that, to his knowledge, the Recreation Building, the site of two anti-ROTC demonstrations, was open to the events only on special arrangement by the university. Saylor said that someone whose last name he recalled as "Black" was "hired by ROTC and if anything happened he was to take pictures for us."
 
Campus Culture