Kinoy describes expulsion from HUAC hearing: 1966
Arthur Kinoy, a civil rights attorney and Rutgers University professor, is shown August 17, 1966 in Washington, D.C. explaining to journalists how he was ejected from a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) earlier in the day and arrested.
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Kinoy was debating a legal issue with committee chair Rep. Joe Pool (D-TX) when he was seized by U.S. marshals and dragged choking and screaming from the hearing room and charged with disorderly conduct.
Attorneys for other witnesses denounced the arrest as “terror and intimidation” and walked out of the hearing creating a legal problem for the committee since witnesses were guaranteed legal counsel “of their own choice” and cannot be forced to testify in the absence of counsel.
A witness friendly to the committee, Phillip A. McCombs, assistant editor of the right-wing National Review, began testifying about pro-National Liberation Front figures in the anti-Vietnam War movement and mentioned the name of Walter Teague, an organizer of the U.S. Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front.
Kinoy and his law partner William Kunstler objected saying they were entitled to cross-examine the witness because the testimony would otherwise “defame” Teague.
Pool ruled against the objections, but Kinoy kept pressing the point and that’s when the marshals seized him.
Other attorneys denounced the “brutal,” “inexcusable,” “unprecedented” treatment of Kinoy.
Kinoy was found guilty August 19, 1966 and addressed the judge before sentencing “I make no plea for mercy. I have no regrets or remorse for what I have done. I would do it again and again and again.” Kinoy was fined $50.
It took two years and three court-proceedings, but Kinoy was exonerated by the U.S. Court of Appeals August 6, 1968. Over 1,000 lawyers had earlier submitted a friend-of-court brief on Kinoy’s behalf.
The Court ruled that Pool had violated the committee’s own rules by ordering the ejection on his own rather than obtaining concurrence from a majority of the committee.
The Court further held that the committee had not pursued a case against Kinoy at any stage for contempt and therefore it was “difficult to understand how or why an independent tribunal can lawfully proceed.”
The court noted that Kinoy had been charged under a statute that prohibits congregation and assembly and the “use of loud and boisterous talking.” However, the court said, “whatever groups may be included in the definition of unlawful assembly, a lawyer permitted to represent his clients at a hearing of a House subcommittee is not one of them.”
Arthur Kinoy biography:
Arthur Kinoy (September 29, 1920-September 19, 2003) was brought up in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrants. He graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1941 and served with the U.S. Army in North Africa and Italy where he was among the troops at Anzio that were nearly pushed back into the sea by German Nazi forces.
After the war, he graduated from Columbia University law school in 1947 where he was editor of its law review. He went to work for the United Electrical Workers (UE), a union that left the Congress of Industrial Organizations rather than be expelled as the Second Red Scare heated up.
Kinoy had a long career as a civil rights and civil liberties attorney from the early 1950s until shortly before his death in 2003.
He made the last legal appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. Kinoy lost and the Rosenberg’s were executed. He claimed he won the appeal legally, but was defeated by the judge’s cowardice.
He remembered that case in a 1982 interview, “We found some statutes that said even if a person were found guilty of espionage, capital punishment could not be applied unless the espionage was committed in a time of war. The judge, Jerome Frank, who was a liberal, a New Deal supporter, said, ‘I cannot go over the heads of my bosses.’ We were furious…And later we were listening to the car radio as the Rosenbergs were taken to the electric chair. This was just disastrous.”
He defended communists and others charged with advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government during the McCarthy era and represented clients before the HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee.
He became law partners with William Kunstler, another prominent defender of radical causes and civil rights.
Kinoy established an important legal principle in the struggle for Black civil rights when he persuaded a reluctant Virginia judge that plaintiffs could take civil rights complaints to federal court under laws passed after the U.S. Civil War.
He argued six cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning five.
These included a reversal of U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell’s expulsion from Congress and a bar against U.S. President Richard Nixon from eavesdropping on antiwar activists for alleged national security reasons without a warrant.
In 1965 he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court establishing that federal district judges could stop enforcement of laws that had a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Perhaps his most famous case was that of the Chicago 7 where five of the defendants had been convicted for crossing state lines to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Kinoy won a reversal of the convictions on appeal.
He was a law professor at Rutgers from 1964-1991 and when he reached mandatory retirement age, his students waged a campaign to keep him on. When he was finally forced out Henry Furst, an attorney and former student, said “Over his 25 years he is the reason many students came to Rutgers—to study with him, it’s like killing Socrates.”
He was a co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights and his last case was a victory over New York City police on a racial profiling issue.
Kinoy, a man of small stature, was known for his aggressiveness in the courtroom.
He explained in a 1992 interview in the Progressive:
“When people are fighting back or fighting to extend their own immediate rights, we learned that when you took the offensive in the courtroom, you were saying, ‘We’re not running away!’ When people saw that you were challenging the conspiracy of the establishment against them and we said, ‘They’re going to be the defendants! They’re the ones who are violating the fundamental laws of the land.’ It had a morale effect. What mattered to the leaders was not whether we ultimately won, but whether it made the people fight harder and begin to demonstrate. That would have an effect upon the courts.”
Kinoy was active in attempting to establish a third party to challenge the establishment Democratic and Republic Parties and described himself as a “scientific socialist.” In 1983 he published a book on his life entitled Rights on Trial, The Odyssey of a People’s Lawyer.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsk72YVXD
The photographer is unknown. The image is an Associated Press photograph housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.
Kinoy describes expulsion from HUAC hearing: 1966
Arthur Kinoy, a civil rights attorney and Rutgers University professor, is shown August 17, 1966 in Washington, D.C. explaining to journalists how he was ejected from a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) earlier in the day and arrested.
,
Kinoy was debating a legal issue with committee chair Rep. Joe Pool (D-TX) when he was seized by U.S. marshals and dragged choking and screaming from the hearing room and charged with disorderly conduct.
Attorneys for other witnesses denounced the arrest as “terror and intimidation” and walked out of the hearing creating a legal problem for the committee since witnesses were guaranteed legal counsel “of their own choice” and cannot be forced to testify in the absence of counsel.
A witness friendly to the committee, Phillip A. McCombs, assistant editor of the right-wing National Review, began testifying about pro-National Liberation Front figures in the anti-Vietnam War movement and mentioned the name of Walter Teague, an organizer of the U.S. Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front.
Kinoy and his law partner William Kunstler objected saying they were entitled to cross-examine the witness because the testimony would otherwise “defame” Teague.
Pool ruled against the objections, but Kinoy kept pressing the point and that’s when the marshals seized him.
Other attorneys denounced the “brutal,” “inexcusable,” “unprecedented” treatment of Kinoy.
Kinoy was found guilty August 19, 1966 and addressed the judge before sentencing “I make no plea for mercy. I have no regrets or remorse for what I have done. I would do it again and again and again.” Kinoy was fined $50.
It took two years and three court-proceedings, but Kinoy was exonerated by the U.S. Court of Appeals August 6, 1968. Over 1,000 lawyers had earlier submitted a friend-of-court brief on Kinoy’s behalf.
The Court ruled that Pool had violated the committee’s own rules by ordering the ejection on his own rather than obtaining concurrence from a majority of the committee.
The Court further held that the committee had not pursued a case against Kinoy at any stage for contempt and therefore it was “difficult to understand how or why an independent tribunal can lawfully proceed.”
The court noted that Kinoy had been charged under a statute that prohibits congregation and assembly and the “use of loud and boisterous talking.” However, the court said, “whatever groups may be included in the definition of unlawful assembly, a lawyer permitted to represent his clients at a hearing of a House subcommittee is not one of them.”
Arthur Kinoy biography:
Arthur Kinoy (September 29, 1920-September 19, 2003) was brought up in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrants. He graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1941 and served with the U.S. Army in North Africa and Italy where he was among the troops at Anzio that were nearly pushed back into the sea by German Nazi forces.
After the war, he graduated from Columbia University law school in 1947 where he was editor of its law review. He went to work for the United Electrical Workers (UE), a union that left the Congress of Industrial Organizations rather than be expelled as the Second Red Scare heated up.
Kinoy had a long career as a civil rights and civil liberties attorney from the early 1950s until shortly before his death in 2003.
He made the last legal appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. Kinoy lost and the Rosenberg’s were executed. He claimed he won the appeal legally, but was defeated by the judge’s cowardice.
He remembered that case in a 1982 interview, “We found some statutes that said even if a person were found guilty of espionage, capital punishment could not be applied unless the espionage was committed in a time of war. The judge, Jerome Frank, who was a liberal, a New Deal supporter, said, ‘I cannot go over the heads of my bosses.’ We were furious…And later we were listening to the car radio as the Rosenbergs were taken to the electric chair. This was just disastrous.”
He defended communists and others charged with advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government during the McCarthy era and represented clients before the HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee.
He became law partners with William Kunstler, another prominent defender of radical causes and civil rights.
Kinoy established an important legal principle in the struggle for Black civil rights when he persuaded a reluctant Virginia judge that plaintiffs could take civil rights complaints to federal court under laws passed after the U.S. Civil War.
He argued six cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning five.
These included a reversal of U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell’s expulsion from Congress and a bar against U.S. President Richard Nixon from eavesdropping on antiwar activists for alleged national security reasons without a warrant.
In 1965 he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court establishing that federal district judges could stop enforcement of laws that had a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Perhaps his most famous case was that of the Chicago 7 where five of the defendants had been convicted for crossing state lines to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Kinoy won a reversal of the convictions on appeal.
He was a law professor at Rutgers from 1964-1991 and when he reached mandatory retirement age, his students waged a campaign to keep him on. When he was finally forced out Henry Furst, an attorney and former student, said “Over his 25 years he is the reason many students came to Rutgers—to study with him, it’s like killing Socrates.”
He was a co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights and his last case was a victory over New York City police on a racial profiling issue.
Kinoy, a man of small stature, was known for his aggressiveness in the courtroom.
He explained in a 1992 interview in the Progressive:
“When people are fighting back or fighting to extend their own immediate rights, we learned that when you took the offensive in the courtroom, you were saying, ‘We’re not running away!’ When people saw that you were challenging the conspiracy of the establishment against them and we said, ‘They’re going to be the defendants! They’re the ones who are violating the fundamental laws of the land.’ It had a morale effect. What mattered to the leaders was not whether we ultimately won, but whether it made the people fight harder and begin to demonstrate. That would have an effect upon the courts.”
Kinoy was active in attempting to establish a third party to challenge the establishment Democratic and Republic Parties and described himself as a “scientific socialist.” In 1983 he published a book on his life entitled Rights on Trial, The Odyssey of a People’s Lawyer.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsk72YVXD
The photographer is unknown. The image is an Associated Press photograph housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.