Public Square Lecture Series
Public Square Lecture Series
7 p.m. - Room 225
Unreported by the media, the story of the Cuban 5 is told by one of their appeals attorneys: Leonard Weinglass, veteran of trials including the Pentagon Papers, the Chicago 7, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. With union activist and filmmaker Gloria La Riva.
In 1998, the FBI incarcerated five Cubans who were monitoring organizations that terrorized their homeland—groups based in Miami and allegedly supported by the CIA. The Cuban 5 were tried and convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in the one place they would never get a fair jury: Miami. Civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass will discuss the conviction and the appeal for a retrial.
Defense Attorney, U.S. v. Campa
(the Cuban Five Case)
Leonard Weinglass is a renowned defense attorney and civil rights activist. He has worked on some of the most controversial trials of our time, representing the Chicago 7, Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, Pentagon Papers’ defendant Anthony Russo, members of the American Indian Movement and of the Weather Underground, Amy Carter, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, the only political prisoner on death row in the U.S.
Professor of Law,
William Mitchell College of Law
Professor Peter Erlinder is the author of three Cuban Five amicus briefs on behalf of the National Lawyer Guild, two of which focused on the U.S. Attorney’s admission of impossibility of a fair trial in Miami and were cited by the three-judge panel that struck down the initial conviction in the “Perfect Storm” decision. Professor Erlinder is a past-president of the National Lawyers Guild and current president of ADAD, Association de Advocats de la Defence, the defense lawyers association at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He teaches Constitutional Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Procedure at William Mitchell.