In the predawn hours of August 22, 1971, a group of priests and lay Catholics broke into the federal building in Camden, New Jersey. They crawled up a ladder and into the building through an upper-story window, headed to the draft board office, and set about vandalizing the office and grabbing piles of paperwork out of filing cabinets—seeking “to stop, or at least slow down, the wheels of the draft that was plucking up young American men to fight and die in Vietnam” (1). They and various co-conspirators—the Camden 28, as they became known—proceeded to trial on federal conspiracy charges in early 1973.

Remarkably, jurors voted to acquit all the defendants of all the charges—notwithstanding that the government presented overwhelming evidence of guilt in the courtroom, including photographs and audio recordings of the break-in. The saga of the Camden 28, ably reconstructed by Michelle Nickerson into a concise narrative in Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, was an idiosyncratic episode of American legal history. Neither the moral rhetoric that pervaded the trial nor its outcome were representative of federal criminal proceedings (then or now), which more typically end with a guilty plea. But Nickerson makes a strong case that the Camden 28, along with the Catholic Left more generally, merit scholarly study precisely because, not in spite of, the trial’s distinctiveness. As Spiritual Criminals and other studies of this movement make clear, the Catholic Left exemplifies the complex ways in which religion shaped ordinary Americans’ interactions with law and government in the late twentieth century, across the political spectrum.

Spiritual Criminals is organized in three parts. In part one, Nickerson provides general background on the Catholic Left, including discussions of the movement’s influences, organization, and somewhat complicated (at times messy) social, interpersonal, and gender dynamics. In part two, she turns more specifically to the Camden 28, retracing the preparations for the raid, the raid itself, and the FBI investigation. After the raid, it was revealed that the FBI had been surveilling the co-conspirators all along and, indeed, had placed an informant in their camp whose assistance enabled swift arrests of the defendants. In part three, the book’s centerpiece, Nickerson provides a detailed narrative of the trial itself and the afterlives of the participants.

The trial of the Camden 28 would prove one of the last high-profile confrontations between the antiwar movement and the machinery of federal criminal law. Earlier examples include the Catonsville Nine trial in 1968, which involved an earlier draft board raid carried out by the Catholic Left, including the charismatic Berrigan brothers, and the more widely remembered Chicago Seven trial, recently given the Aaron Sorkin treatment in a fictionalized Netflix dramatization. By the time of the Camden 28 trial, the United States was already in the process of withdrawing troops from Vietnam and winding down the use of military conscription.

Even against those venerable comparisons, the Camden 28 trial stands out as noteworthy. True, the defendants reprised the familiar courtroom tactics of political trials throughout history, such as turning the courtroom into a stage and rhetorically putting the government itself on trial. However, Nickerson argues that the Camden 28 were especially adept, and successful, at deploying these tactics: “They followed the playbooks of earlier [political] trials but managed to transform the courtroom far more extensively than their predecessors had. … In keeping with the Catholic Left’s principles of communitarianism, peace, and personalism, the 28 crafted their statements and testimony to promote familiarity even as they argued their points fiercely” (122).

The Camden 28’s Catholic sensibility, combined with their radical politics, infused the defense strategy. A handful accepted representation by lawyers, but the majority insisted upon proceeding pro se. Their insistence upon self-representation exemplified their mistrust of law and legal institutions, and the radical view of “lawyers as the embodiment of the establishment—mere tacticians,” at odds with the “authentic, truthful defense” that they envisioned (125). At trial, the defendants representing themselves addressed the jurors directly, using an “intimate and informal tone” and introducing themselves by their first names (151).

Father Michael Doyle, an Irish immigrant and a parish priest in Camden, turned his opening statement into a kind of prayer: he asked “that a blessing of truth and a spirit of truth would come upon the deliberations of this room,” presenting his case as “a motion to a higher court than this one” (quoted at 153). Later in the trial, Doyle testified for four days as one of the dozens of defense witnesses. He spoke about the legacy of English oppression in Ireland, his own childhood on an Irish farm, the urban poverty he had witnessed in Camden (complete with a slide show), and his motivations for participating in the raid. Ranging across centuries of history and his full autobiography, Doyle’s testimony exemplified in microcosm the wide-ranging defense case, which also included expert testimony from both Berrigan brothers and the scholar-activist Howard Zinn (among other witnesses) and character testimony from the parents of several of the defendants.

As in other political trials of the Vietnam era, the defendants also benefited from movement support and a carnivalesque atmosphere. An ad hoc organization called the Camden 28 Defense Committee mobilized to raise funds and provide support throughout the proceedings. Each day, for the sixty days the trial was in session, the courtroom was packed with “family, friends, supporters, journalists, and other observers” (145). When court was out of session, supporters flocked to evening events including a benefit performance by the comedian George Carlin, a rock concert at nearby Rutgers University, and a public talk by Father Daniel Berrigan, who had been convicted of similar charges a few years earlier as one of the Catonsville Nine.

Still, the timing of the trial also goes some way to explaining the outcome. The Camden 28 defendants benefited from tailwinds that earlier antiwar defendants could not. By the time the trial occurred in 1973, amid the winddown of the Vietnam war, emerging revelations of FBI counterintelligence abuses, and the unfolding Watergate scandal, mistrust and cynicism about the federal government was becoming increasingly mainstream, and the Camden 28 may not have appeared quite so radical or incomprehensible to jurors and courtroom observers. Indeed, the book details how one of the defendant’s mothers, a conservative Catholic, found her own views on the Vietnam war shifting during the trial itself after listening to Zinn’s testimony on behalf of the defense about the history of US designs upon Indochina.

The Camden 28 also benefited from a somewhat sympathetic trial judge, Clarkson Fisher. A fellow Catholic, he had also learned from the example of the earlier Chicago Seven trial that wielding an overly heavy hand in trial management could backfire. As a result, he allowed the defense to introduce an extraordinary degree of arguably irrelevant evidence. Indeed, under a very strict legal definition of relevance, limited to facts probative of the defendants’ guilt—which the Camden 28 did not contest—one might argue that almost all the defense testimony was irrelevant. Nevertheless, Judge Fisher allowed them to describe at great length their personal motivations and backgrounds, which helped them to build sympathy and rapport with the jury.

Even before the trial, the defense team had poured time and effort into researching the jury pool and preparing for jury selection, pioneering methods that would later become the province of high-priced jury consultants. The ultimate jury was about as close to the proverbial jury of their peers as they could hope for, encompassing a cross-section of primarily working-class jurors, many with Catholic or otherwise Christian backgrounds, although diverse politically and racially. The defendants’ courtroom displays of sincerity and idealism likely made them relatable to the judge and jurors. Notably, even one of the prosecutors in the case told a journalist as he left the courtroom, “It ended the way it should have ended” (quoted at 176), and jurors and federal marshals joined in the defendants’ festivities at a party celebrating the verdict.

For legal scholars, Spiritual Criminals has much to offer as a case study of a fascinating trial that illuminates by contrast the sterility and predictability of more routine criminal proceedings. Nickerson is a historian of politics and social movements, whose prior work has examined the role of women in postwar conservative politics, and Spiritual Criminals rests upon the methods of social history. Nickerson draws upon her own interviews with participants, as well as trial transcripts, published memoirs, and an array of archival materials, to construct a riveting but concise narrative. As such, Nickerson delves more briefly than a legal historian might have into the evidentiary doctrines and courtroom procedures that shaped the trial, but she does provide enough legal context to make clear how unusual the trial was in many respects.

Of course, the central oddity of the trial was that it ended in acquittal. The government presented ample evidence of guilt and the defendants did not deny that they had committed the acts alleged. Therefore, the acquittal verdict might be viewed as an instance of jury nullification. On that score, however, the trial judge’s instructions to the jury muddied the waters a bit. Even though he had already technically ruled out an entrapment defense, he nevertheless instructed the jurors that they could acquit if the defendants’ arrest “reached an intolerable degree of overreaching government participation” (quoted at 174). For whatever reason, though, the jury was apparently convinced by the defendants’ case more than by the government’s.

Spiritual Criminals joins a rich but underappreciated literature on the history of the so-called Catholic Left, or Catholic “ultraresistance,” the movement of priests, nuns, and lay Catholics who engaged in direct action to protest the Vietnam War and other injustices of the 1960s and 1970s. As Nickerson observes, this movement was widely covered in the media at the time—not surprisingly, given the inherent drama of priests and nuns under arrest—but has faded from popular memory of the Vietnam era. Nickerson argues that scholars should pay more attention to this corner of the antiwar movement. The Catholic Left, she argues, “played a significant role in the success of the Vietnam-era peace movement” because its tactics were so effective at “exposing [the war]’s atrocities and making the draft unsustainable” (2–3).

Still, the Catholic Left in its Vietnam-era iteration was a relatively small and short-lived mobilization. Why should scholars interested in the interplay of law and religion more generally pay attention to this movement? In some ways, the rise and fall of the Vietnam-era Catholic Left owed less to the theological specifics of the Catholic Church and more to the sociological phenomenon of Catholicism’s rise and fall as a distinctive subculture within the twentieth-century United States, particularly within working-class, immigrant communities in the Northeast and Midwest. The Camden 28 spanned the spectrum of religious devotion, ranging from the parish priest Father Doyle to others who had already moved away from the church by the time of the draft board raid. Many of the actors that Nickerson examines in Spiritual Criminals did not remain affiliated with the institutional church into adulthood. They had been raised Catholic, however, and formed by a recognizably Catholic sensibility. Nickerson situates them within “the Catholic Imagination,” defined as “a mentality shared by people raised in the orbit of the church” that is cultural as much as it is religious (6). This mentality encompasses an attention to ritual, as evidenced by how activists used legal proceedings “as occasions for celebrating spiritual community” (6). As Nickerson puts it, describing one member of the Camden 28, they “adopted the ideals of community and the Gospel examples of nonviolence but let go of the sacraments” (83).

They also took from Catholicism a message of concern for life and care for the vulnerable, and perhaps a tendency toward strict moral line-drawing, which drove them—once they had turned against the Vietnam War—to turn against it quite stridently. As I have written elsewhere, this sensibility could put Catholic leftists at odds with mainstream liberalism, with its fetish for procedure, compromise, and pragmatism, and its veneration for lawyers and courts.Footnote ¹ Understanding these cultural differences can help to make sense of deeper fissures within, and dissent from, American legal culture—fissures that have persisted beyond the specific conflict over the Vietnam War. In this way, Spiritual Criminals, along with other works on the Catholic Left, illustrates the importance of weaving religious history into twentieth-century American legal history. Even after the nation had ostensibly become modern and secular, religious institutions, teachings, and traditions continued to influence both lawbreaking and law enforcement in the United States, in ways both direct and indirect.