Ohio Sedition Trial (7 ): 1989

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the UFF was alleged to have conducted a number of bank robberies and bombings in New England and New York. In one of the latter, a bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, 22 people were injured, the most serious of whom had to have his leg amputated below the knee. The members eluded authorities until five of them were arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1984; two more were arrested in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1985. In April 1986, a Brooklyn, New York jury found six of the seven guilty of various bombings and they were sentenced to terms ranging from 15 years to life. The seventh, Patricia Gros Levasseur, was found guilty of the charge of harboring a fugitive—the group's leader, Raymond Luc Levasseur, her husband and father of their three children. In separate trials, one of the members, Thomas M. Manning, was also found guilty of murdering a New Jersey state policeman, while another, Jaan Karl Laaman, was convicted of armed assault in a shootout with a Massachusetts state trooper.