Conclusion
Certain trials become fulcrums on which our public moral knowledge turns. These are the trials we first think of when we face conflicts of conscience. Dissent is powerful when, as illustrated by each of the trials in this chapter, the act is symbolic.
Violence undermines the appeal to conscience. The striking similarity in such trials is how closely they resemble the trial of Socrates. He was accused of presenting a threat to Athens, not through violence, but by raising questions about its moral assumptions. The same can be said of More and the others.The critical task in trials of dissenters, whether Socrates or an antiwar demonstrator of our time, is the attempt to convince a representative of society that the policy of the government is wrong. The prosecution in such trials seeks to prove to the same representative that the dissenter is not only mistaken but constitutes a threat. The representative may be the judge, the jury, the media, or, more commonly, all three at the same time. An appeal to conscience is an appeal to shared moral knowledge. In order for conscience to respond to conscience the trial must be public. Whatever the fate of the dissenter—whether death in the cases of Socrates and More, exile for Williams and Hutchinson, jail terms for many including most antiwar dissenters, or acquittal in the trials of Lilburne and Zenger—the aim of the trial from both sides is to influence and move the society by touching its sense of right and wrong. That is why the issue of jury nullification is present in one form or another in trials of dissenters. Perhaps the most dauntless appeal for a type of jury nullification comes from Socrates who after he had been found guilty, proposed the penalty which would be his due: a pension for the rest of his life. He had spent his life teaching Athenians to seek virtue and wisdom, and he should be rewarded.136 Those who have no hope of any jury nullification, such as More, Williams, or Hutchinson, nevertheless appeal to the wider jury.
If the trial jury is rigged and the trial itself a partisan show, the verdict might be a long time in coming. While More was executed five days after his trial in 1535, four hundred years later he became a saint.Dissenters take a risk in appealing to representatives of society. They may lose the immediate trial, but they are confident that once the conscience of society is touched, society will respond. Dissenters do not question the propriety of that conscience. Once society understands, dissenters believe, it will respond properly. Once the American people understand the wrongness of the Vietnam War, the unfairness of the draft, the madness of nuclear arms; once Christians understand the wrongness of a sovereign king controlling the church or the idolatry of forced orthodoxy; once Englishmen understand the folly of arbitrary rule by a king or the military grandees, or once the Athenians understand the rationality of living according to their conscience, then we will all live more just lives.
Not every dissenter can rightly claim that he or she appeals to conscience. Not every prosecutor of a dissenter is standing on the moral dark side of society and history. Not every judge and jury who convict a dissenter will have their verdicts reversed in time. Admittedly, the trials covered in this chapter have been selected because of the Socrates factor: the defendants have either been vindicated or stand in the likelihood of moral exoneration. The next chapter will concern itself with dissenters who, in spite of their moral sincerity and fervor, have earned society’s reproach. Fritz Adler assassinated the Austrian prime minister to protest World War I; Paul Hill murdered an abortion doctor, while Karlton Armstrong and Timothy McVeigh blew up buildings. These trials are, in short, fundamentally different from those covered in this chapter because the methods of dissent are different and the questions raised are inevitably different. They are notable because they do not follow the Socrates model.