He was a cleric. But was he a criminal?
Yale University's chaplain, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., was arrested several times during the civil rights movement. But his most notable bust was on charges of conspiring to help young men dodge the draft during the Vietnam War.
Coffin, then 43, was indicted in January 1968 by a federal grand jury in Boston. He and four others were charged with spearheading a nationwide conspiracy to counsel youth to avoid the draft.
Because of his two sometimes conflicting roles of crusader and family man, Coffin told The Courant then that he had mixed emotions about whether he would be arrested.
"As far as whether I want to be arrested or not," he said in an article published in The Courant, "you can imagine my feelings are kind of mixed. I have a wife I love deeply and three small children, and going off to the pokey for a certain time would make me feel a bit guilty both as a husband and a father."
He added, however: "If, on the other hand, we would take the case to court, and if it were possible in a good court case to bring out all the things we've been talking about on the legality of the war and the morality of the war, then ... I would probably feel this were worthwhile."
The controversial Coffin, who was known to wear glasses and a clerical collar, continued by saying that he had no choice but to stand by the young men who refused to go to war.
"I keep looking at it like this: I cannot as chaplain of Yale students not stand by men of conscience. Here we are in the business of raising men of conscience and it is impossible for me to desert them in their hour of conscience."
"I am quite persuaded that 20 years from now when history judges this period as perhaps America's darkest hour, it's going to be terribly important for my children and for all of us in those times to know that there were some people who care enough to go to jail."
It wasn't the only time that Coffin had trouble with the law. He had been arrested several times for participating in "Freedom Rides" in the South and for antiwar activities. Known as the most prominent white minister in the civil rights movement, he was referred to by some as the conscience of a nation.
He believed in civil disobedience, which he practiced during the civil rights movement and showed others how to practice during anti-war protests.
In the much-publicized conspiracy case, Coffin, a former infantry officer who served during World War II and a former CIA operative who served during the Korean conflict, faced up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The Justice Department had said that the conspiracy charges included a Boston church meeting at which young men went to the altar and burned what they described as their draft cards.
Coffin maintained his innocence. He conceded that he had collected draft cards, but he insisted that he hadn't encouraged students to turn them in. He said that he had never told anyone to violate any law. Still, he added, he was willing to go to jail for the cause.
"I am not an anarchist, not a revolutionary," he said in another article in The Courant at the time. "It is up to me to test this law because they are violating the right of conscience of thousands of young men."
For the most part, Coffin was supported by Yale, where he had become chaplain in 1958. But the support was tempered at times.
A few months before Coffin's indictment, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. backed Coffin's right to voice dissent but told a Parents Day Assembly that the reverend's efforts to "devise 'confrontations' and 'sanctuaries' from the draft in order to gain spot news coverage seems to me to be unworthy of and to detract from the true trial of conscience which touches most of your sons and preoccupies so many," The Courant reported.
The article noted that a recent Yale Alumni Magazine had included letters criticizing Coffin's views.
But in February 1968, a month after Coffin's indictment, a Courant headline stated: "Majority of Yale Faculty Support Coffin Position."
"We, who are colleagues of William Sloane Coffin on the faculty of Yale University, are convinced that he has acted out of the strongest sense of moral responsibility in protesting the war in Vietnam," the article quoted a faculty statement. "It is not necessary to approve of all Mr. Coffin may have done in order to have great respect for his motives for doing it."
After the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968, The Nation magazine called Coffin "the true heir to Martin Luther King Jr." because of Coffin's progressive Christianity.
In May 1968, Coffin was renamed Yale's chaplain despite his upcoming trial. Brewster said in a letter that none of the Yale trustees felt that Coffin should be refused appointment because of the federal indictment against him, The Courant reported.