Lee Weiner

Lee Weiner (born September 7th, 1939), a member of the Chicago Seven, was charged with "conspiring to use interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot" and "teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices that would be used in civil disturbances" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Weiner and his co-defendant John Froines were acquitted of the charges by the jury.

When the trial of the Chicago Eight began in the early fall of 1969, Weiner was a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Northwestern University, and had previously graduated from the University of Illinois, studied political philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a master's degree in social work from Loyola University's School of Social Work in Chicago. At Northwestern University, Weiner worked for Professor Howard S. Becker as a research assistant.

The Chicago Eight defendants each contributed an essay to the book Conspiracy, published in November 1969. In Weiner's essay, "The Political Trial of a People's Insurrection," he writes:

Using the artificial, state-controlled rules of the court, the U.S. government's prosecutors and judge will attempt to interpret the people's insurrection in Chicago as the private and deliberate manipulation of eight evil men. The government will be desperate to play down the independent action of thousands of people who openly resisted illegitimate political and police power. The trial, therefore, must blur and soften the contours of what actually happened, and instead focus upon and magnify the roles of these eight men in particular. The alternative image - one of a popular insurrection rooted in the experience and desires of people that was put down by the deliberate exercise of state-controlled violence - too clearly focuses public attention on what America is all about. The government effort is intended to punish and frighten a growing, insurgent mass movement of both the young and concerned adults, and to protect the official myths of political reality in America.

...
Wikipedia