Can they? I know judges can order a defendant be shackled if he’s proven himself a security threat; even if a jury’s present. I also understand that in most courts it’s SOP for a defendant who repeadedly insists on disrupting court proceedings to simply removed from the courtroom and made to watch the proceedings on CCTV. But can a judge decide to keep him in the courtroom and have the security officers gag him? If so what would they gag him with? I know police & prison/jail guards have masks they can put on inmates to stop them from biting or spitting at staff; do they also have gags to keep them from speaking? Info for American courts would be most appreceated, but I also wonder about other 1st world countries?
I think they generally send the defendant to another room to watch proceedings from another room, don’t they? If a court was going to gag anybody, this fellow cussing the judge during a hearing accusing him of hawking his HIV+ saliva on a prison guard would qualify, I imagine. But they just take him out of the courtroom.
Bobby Seale was ordered bound and gagged during the Chicago Eighttrial in 1969 (see second paragraph of the section). This was a drawing of how he looked (no cameras in the courtrooms back then).
The judge in the Chicago Seven trial had Bobby Seale bound and gagged.
The asshole who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart (Brian David Mitchell) insisted on singing/shouting Mormon hymns during his trial (he was clearly setting himself up for a “Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity” acquittal years before the trial actually began) and he was gagged on several occasions, albeit with a little hood-like thing that they made him wear over his entire head.
After a while, the judge apparently got sick of the “Crazy Religious Zealot” act and just started having him removed for the courtroom altogether, ordering him put in a holding cell with a closed circuit TV feed of the proceedings.
(Of course, it was still the Chicago 8 when Seale was still part of the case.)
Maybe they didn’t commonly have CCTV facilities back in the day, like the so commonly do now. (Anybody remember for sure?)
One day, while the trial was still going on, my English Lit class at Berkeley got sidetracked into discussing it. The general consensus in the class was that the defendants and the judge alike were all being total assholes.
True but I’ve always thought about it as the Chicago Seven since Bobby Seale was never in any way associated with the other seven and should not have been part of that trial. I agree that both sides were acting like assholes but the defendants had really every right to act that way considering the absurdity of the judges behavior. Judge Hoffman deserves nothing but scorn for his behavior. He was a very opinionated old man who had lost respect for the law and acted above the law and thought nothing of denying a defendant his constitutional rights.
If the court cannot respect the law and act accordingly you can hardly expect the defense to especially since his behavior made the appeal a slam dunk. They literally had nothing to lose in making a travesty of that court and were handed a free pass to put the system on trial instead of themselves which is what they wanted in the first place. That is on the judge. With a reasonable judge that trial would have proceeded quite differently.
Here is an excerpt from a good read about why Mr Seale was forced to be gagged and it answers the question about what they gagged him with.