 A primary theme of the defense was that the CPUSA sought to convert the US to socialism by education , not by force . The defense claimed that most of the prosecution 's documentary evidence came from older texts that pre @-@ dated the 1935 Seventh World Congress of the Comintern , after which the CPUSA rejected violence as a means of change . The defense attempted to introduce documents into evidence which represented the CPUSA 's advocacy of peace , claiming that these policies superseded the older texts that the prosecution had introduced which emphasized violence . Medina excluded most of the material proposed by the defense because it did not directly pertain to the specific documents the prosecution had produced . As a result , the defense complained that they were unable to portray the totality of their belief system to the jury . 
