After the 1949 convictions, prosecutors waited until the constitutional issues were settled by the Supreme Court before they tried additional leaders of the CPUSA.
When the 1951 Dennis decision upholding the convictions was announced, prosecutors initiated indictments of 132 additional CPUSA leaders, called "second string" or "second-tier" defendants.
The second-tier defendants were prosecuted in three waves: 1951, 1954, and 1956.
Their trials were held in more than a dozen cities, including Los Angeles (15 CPUSA defendants, including Dorothy Healey, leader of the California branch of the CPUSA); New York (21 defendants, including National Committee members Claudia Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn); Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, Boston, Puerto Rico, and New Haven.

The second-tier defendants had a difficult time finding lawyers to represent them.
The five defense attorneys at the 1949 trial had been jailed for contempt of court, and both Abraham J. Isserman and Harry Sacher were disbarred.
Attorneys for other Smith Act defendants routinely found themselves attacked by courts, attorneys' groups, and licensing boards, leading many defense attorneys to shun Smith Act cases.
Some defendants were forced to contact more than one hundred attorneys before finding one who would take their case; defendant Steve Nelson could not find a lawyer in Pennsylvania who would represent him in his Smith Act trial, so he was forced to represent himself.
Judges sometimes had to appoint unwilling counsel for defendants who could not find a lawyer to take their cases.
The National Lawyers Guild provided some lawyers to the defendants, but in 1953 Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. threatened to list the Guild as a subversive organization, causing half its members to leave.

Some second-tier defendants were unable to post bail because the government refused to permit the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) legal defense fund to provide bail funding.
The CRC had run afoul of the judicial system because it had posted bail for the 1949 trial defendants, and four of those defendants skipped bail in 1951.
Leaders of the CRC were called before a grand jury and asked to identify the donors who had contributed money to the bail fund.
Novelist Dashiell Hammett, a manager of the CRC fund, invoked the Fifth Amendment, refused to identify donors, and was sentenced to six months in prison.

To supply witnesses for the second-tier trials, the Justice Department relied on a dozen informants, who traveled full-time from trial to trial, testifying about communism and the CPUSA.
The informants were paid for their time; for example, Budenz earned $70,000 ($673,947 in 2019 dollars) from his activities as a witness.
After the 1949 convictions, prosecutors waited until the constitutional issues were settled by the Supreme Court before they tried additional leaders of the CPUSA. When the 1951 Dennis decision upholding the convictions was announced, prosecutors initiated indictments of 132 additional CPUSA leaders, called "second string" or "second-tier" defendants. The second-tier defendants were prosecuted in three waves: 1951, 1954, and 1956. Their trials were held in more than a dozen cities, including Los Angeles (15 CPUSA defendants, including Dorothy Healey, leader of the California branch of the CPUSA); New York (21 defendants, including National Committee members Claudia Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn); Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, Boston, Puerto Rico, and New Haven.
The second-tier defendants had a difficult time finding lawyers to represent them. The five defense attorneys at the 1949 trial had been jailed for contempt of court, and both Abraham J. Isserman and Harry Sacher were disbarred. Attorneys for other Smith Act defendants routinely found themselves attacked by courts, attorneys' groups, and licensing boards, leading many defense attorneys to shun Smith Act cases. Some defendants were forced to contact more than one hundred attorneys before finding one who would take their case; defendant Steve Nelson could not find a lawyer in Pennsylvania who would represent him in his Smith Act trial, so he was forced to represent himself. Judges sometimes had to appoint unwilling counsel for defendants who could not find a lawyer to take their cases. The National Lawyers Guild provided some lawyers to the defendants, but in 1953 Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. threatened to list the Guild as a subversive organization, causing half its members to leave.
Some second-tier defendants were unable to post bail because the government refused to permit the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) legal defense fund to provide bail funding. The CRC had run afoul of the judicial system because it had posted bail for the 1949 trial defendants, and four of those defendants skipped bail in 1951. Leaders of the CRC were called before a grand jury and asked to identify the donors who had contributed money to the bail fund. Novelist Dashiell Hammett, a manager of the CRC fund, invoked the Fifth Amendment, refused to identify donors, and was sentenced to six months in prison.
To supply witnesses for the second-tier trials, the Justice Department relied on a dozen informants, who traveled full-time from trial to trial, testifying about communism and the CPUSA. The informants were paid for their time; for example, Budenz earned $70,000 ($673,947 in 2019 dollars) from his activities as a witness.
Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders