first child – a boy named Nikola, after Šešelj's father – however, Šešelj refused to end the hunger strike even after being told this. Weak, frail, and with rapidly deteriorating overall health, he eventually relented on the last day of the trial, ending the strike after 48 days. Several days later, on 9 July 1984, he was given an eight-year sentence. The verdict delivered by presiding judge Milorad Potparić concluded that Šešelj "acted from the anarcho-liberal and nationalist platform thereby committing the criminal act of counterrevolutionary endangerment of the social order". The single most incriminating piece of evidence cited by the court was the unpublished manuscript that the secret police found in Šešelj's home. On appeal, the Supreme Court of SFR Yugoslavia reduced the sentence to six years, then to four, and finally two. Šešelj served the first eight months of his sentence in Sarajevo before getting transferred to prison in Zenica in January 1985, where he was placed in quarantine and isolated from other inmates for three weeks while medical checks and general psychological observation were conducted in order to come up with a rehabilitation plan and program during his prison stay. From the start he informed the prison officials of his refusal to do any labour, reasoning that "since jailed communists didn't have to do prison labour in the pre-World War II capitalist Yugoslavia, I too, as someone espousing anti-communist ideology, refuse to do labour in a communist prison". His conduct earned him multiple stays in solitary confinement that initially lasted two weeks but were later extended to a whole month. During his first solitary confinement stay he went on another hunger strike. A week into his strike, he was beaten by the guards in an effort to force him to stop, but he did not, lasting 16 days without food. In total, out of his fourteen months in Zenica, six and a half were spent in solitary confinement. He was released in March 1986 – two months early due to continuous pressure, protests and petitions by intellectuals throughout Yugoslavia and abroad, many of whom would later become his political opponents. Upon release from prison, Šešelj permanently moved to Belgrade. According to John Mueller, Šešelj "later seems to have become mentally unbalanced as the result of the torture and beatings he endured while in prison". Political career In 1989, Šešelj returned to the United States where Momčilo Đujić,