 Fellow judge James L. Oakes described Medina as a fair and reasonable judge , and wrote that " after the judge saw what the lawyers were doing , he gave them a little bit of their own medicine , too . " Legal scholar and historian Michal Belknap writes that Medina was " unfriendly " to the defense , and that " there is reason to believe that Medina was biased against the defendants " , citing a statement Medina made before the trial : " If we let them do that sort of thing [ postpone the trial start ] , they 'll destroy the government " . According to Belknap , Medina 's behavior towards the defense may have been exacerbated by the fact that another federal judge had died of a heart attack during the 1943 trial involving the Smith Act . Some historians speculate that Medina came to believe that the defense was deliberately trying to provoke him into committing a legal error with the goal of achieving a mistrial . 
