Steve Bratich

AKA: Steve Bradich
Released
Gender:Male
Race:White
Era:1920s
State:Pennsylvania
Support
Communism Labor Organizing Communist Party USA
No image available

Biography

Steve Bratich was the fourth defendant in the Woodlawn (Aliquippa), Pennsylvania sedition case, a group of Communist organizers of the Jones & Laughlin steelworkers arrested in a red raid on Armistice Day, 11 November 1926. Tried under Pennsylvania's Flynn anti-sedition law alongside Pete Muselin, Milan Resetar and Tom Zima, he was convicted in 1927 and sentenced to two and a half years' hard labour at the Allegheny County Workhouse at Blawnox — a lesser term than the five years the other three received. (the surname also appears as Bradich)

He was discharged on appeal in 1928 and so, unlike his co-defendants, never served the sentence. Their own appeals failed: the Pennsylvania Superior Court and Supreme Court both upheld the convictions, the United States Supreme Court declined to review them in 1929, and Muselin, Resetar and Zima entered Blawnox on 26 November 1929. Resetar died there.

This record was previously two, one under each spelling, each holding about half the case: Bratich had the arrest date and the account of the raid, Bradich had the 1927 conviction and the discharge on appeal. They are merged here and both spellings kept.

A. Jakira’s October 1928 Labor Defender account supplies a precise earlier Woodlawn chronology: verdict June 25,1927; sentencing December 12,1927, before Judge Wm.A.McConnel. Muselin, Resetar and Zima received five years and $500 fines plus costs; Bratich received two-and-a-half years and $200. The report dates Bratich’s appellate discharge April 16,1928. This resolves the prior year-only sentencing placeholder; the sentencing day is not copied into a physical-admission field, and the appellate discharge is not treated as a proven prison-release day. The later separate actual custody of the three whose convictions survived remains unchanged.

Labor Defender, October1928, original PDF page18 (printed214).

Case

Allegheny County Workhouse
Charges: Sedition (Pennsylvania Flynn anti-sedition law; organizing Jones & Laughlin steelworkers at Aliquippa)
Arrested: Nov 11, 1926
Sentenced: Dec 12, 1927
Sentence: Two and a half years' hard labour at the Allegheny County Workhouse at Blawnox, on conviction under Pennsylvania's Flynn anti-sedition law — a lesser term than the five years given to Pete Muselin, Milan Resetar and Tom Zima. Discharged on appeal in 1928; he did not serve it. No custody dates are recorded and none should be: the sentence was set aside before he began serving, so there is no imprisonment to count. The line previously carried on the Bratich record, that the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, has been removed from this entry — that is true of the other three defendants, whose appeals ran to a cert denial in 1929, and not of him, whose conviction had already been set aside a year earlier. On the year. This record now gives the conviction as 1927, stored at year precision. Two of the biographies in this case say 1928. 1927 is preferred because the raid was in November 1926, because the fourth defendant's record gives 1927 for the conviction and 1928 for his discharge on appeal, and because the appeals — the Pennsylvania Superior Court, then the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, then a refusal to review by the United States Supreme Court in 1929, then custody in November 1929 — do not fit into the time a 1928 conviction leaves. The 1928 date may be the sentencing rather than the verdict. A court docket would settle it.
Judge: Wm. A. McConnel
Convicted: Yes
Institution State: Pennsylvania

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