"By far the harshest penalty for "flag desecration" in American history was handed our during World War I to a Montana man, E. V. Starr, who under the 1918 Montana law, which became the model for the 1918 federal Sedition Act (document 2.18), was given a $500 fine and a jail term of ten to twenty years at hard labor for refusing a mob's demands to kiss a flag and for terming it "nothing but a piece of cotton" with a "little paint" and "some other marks" on it which "might be covered with microbes." Considering the case on appeal, Federal district court judge George Bourquin termed the sentence a "horrifying" one that justified George Bernard Shaw's comment that American courts had gone "stark, staring, raving mad" during the war; Bourquin also labeled the mob that had assaulted Starr "heresy hunters" and "witch burners." Nonetheless, he concluded that he was powerless to intervene, because the Montana state law was clearly constitutional under the Halter precedent (document 3.25)."
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Earnest V. Starr
Earnest V. Starr (28 May 1870 – unknown) was a farmer and homesteader notable for being tried, convicted, and sentenced to 10–20 years of hard labour in a state penitentiary as well as fined $500 plus court costs for the crime of sedition, because he uttered "contemptuous and slurring language about the flag and language calculated to bring the flag into contempt and disrepute."
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