Supreme Court heard Yates v. United States, in which Rose Chernin was named. In a landmark decision, Chernin’s earlier conviction was overturned, which ruled the Smith Act unconstitutional. Albert J. Lima California leader of the Communist Party. He spoke at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, ending the school's 13-year ban on Communist speakers. He ran unsuccessfully twice as a Communist candidate for the House of Representatives. Other defendants Philip Marshall Connelly, Ernest Otto Fox, Carl Rude Lambert, Henry Steinberg, Oleta O'Connor Yates, and Mary Bernadette Doyle, for which no information is available. Issue When bail for multiple defendants is set at a higher amount than is necessary to ensure their presence at trial, is this a violation of the Eighth Amendment? Court ruling The U.S. Supreme Court found "that a defendant's bail cannot be set higher than an amount that is reasonably likely to ensure the defendant's presence at the trial.” It was determined that the $50,000 bail was excessive, given the lack of financial resources of the defendants and a lack of evidence that they were likely to flee before trial. Under the direction of Chief Justice Vinson, who delivered the opinion of the court, it was found that bail had “not been fixed by proper methods in this case.” Chief Justice Vinson summed up the Constitutional issue by stating: “It is not denied that bail for each petitioner has been fixed in a sum much higher than that usually imposed for offenses with like penalties and yet there has been no factual showing to justify such action in this case...Such conduct would inject into our own system of government the very principles of totalitarianism which Congress was seeking to guard against in passing the statute under which petitioners have been indicted.” Essentially, if a court sets an unusually high bail for multiple defendants, the court needs to have evidence regarding the situations of each defendant (whether they are considered a “flight risk”). Otherwise it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Significance Bail law in the United States remained mostly unchanged until 1966. In 1966, the U.S. Congress passed the Bail Reform Act, which was designed to allow for the release of defendants with as little a financial strain as possible. President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech on the importance of the act, giving examples of how the bail system had harmed people in