Disarmoring the Prosecution Podcast:

The Recollections of Judge Richard Hodge

The Oakland Seven

Today’s ICE tactics, including human-rights violations, covert surveillance, violations of civil rights, and targeting of nonviolent people, has remarkable parallels to the 1969 Vietnam-era “Oakland Seven” trial. Government lies, police brutality, innocents swept up in the fray, and good citizens just trying to do what’s right ... the Oakland Seven trial has it all.

Where to Listen:

  • YouTube (video also embedded below)
  • Apple Podcasts (coming soon...)
  • Spotify

The initial criminal case seemed simple: war protestors acts of civil disobedience. The Oakland Seven were a group of young, radical anti-war activists: Frank Bardacke, Terry Cannon, Reese Erlich, Steve Hamilton, Bob Mandel, Jeff Segal, and Mike Smith. They organized a “Stop the Draft Week” series of protests designed to shut down the Oakland Induction Center, blocking the Army's draft pipeline that was sending young men to die in Vietnam. But unexpectedly, in addition to charging the seven protestors with misdemeanors, Alameda County District Attorney J. Frank Coakley decided to add felony charges: a conspiracy to commit midemeanor offenses, thus vastly raising the stakes for the defendents.

The defense was led by prominent and respected attorneys Charles Garry and Malcolm Burnstein. A young Richard Hodge was brought into the case when his assistant, Karen Jo Koonan, explained that her boyfriend, Frank Bardacke, was one of the defendents.

What initially looked like a straightforward First-Amendment case slowly turned darker and darker as the "conspiracy" charges fell apart and witness after witness implicated the police themselves in the violence.

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    More About Karen Jo Koonan

    Karen Jo Koonan (Richard Hodge's assistant who brought him into the case, and was the girlfriend of defendant Terry Cannon) was one of the primary leaders and organizers of the Stop the Draft Week steering committee that led to the demonstrations at the Oakland Induction Center.

    Koonan was notably not included in the indictment of the seven male organizers, which historians and contemporaries attribute to the prosecutors excluding women from the conspiracy charges at the time.