"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)."