Biography
Robert Goldstein was from Los Angeles, California. Robert Goldstein was sentenced to ten years in prison. He served in McNeil Island Penitentiary from May 9, 1918, to October 13, 1920, when his sentence was commuted.
At the December 21, 1920 Senate amnesty hearing, witness Mr. Lee described Goldstein's Los Angeles prosecution over The Spirit of '76, a film portraying British officers committing atrocities during the American Revolution. Lee said the court treated the film's effect on attitudes toward Britain, then an American ally, as wartime disloyalty. He reported a ten-year sentence and a $5,000 fine, with the prison sentence later commuted to three years. That commuted nominal term is not the measured time actually served.
The Southern District of California row records ten years and two years concurrently, with a $5,000 fine; commuted to three years on March 3, 1919. The table separately identifies sentencing, nominal judgment and circumstances of execution; no new jail admission or actual-service counter is inferred.
1921 Senate amnesty hearings, printed page 89 (PDF page 96).
The Billboard’s December 15, 1917 issue, in a Los Angeles December 8 dispatch headed “Spirit of 76 Confiscated,” reports Goldstein already in federal custody and the film’s positive and negative copies seized while the grand jury considered an Espionage Act indictment. It reports an allegation that he restored scenes after agreeing to cuts, and attributes the prosecution to officials’ concern that the film could arouse resentment against wartime ally Britain. This establishes an earlier pretrial custody component before the stored May 1918 prison admission, but not its admission or release endpoints. The existing measured postconviction component is preserved; the complete prosecution custody total is unknown. The existing 888-day dated postconviction interval remains a known subtotal, rather than a complete account of all detention in the prosecution.
