Treason?

[candyman718]

Does anyone know if it is against the law for an individual or an organization to attempt to dissuade people from entering the military? For example to place advertisements with the sole purpose of trying to prevent people from enlisting. If so, what law(s) would they be violating?

[warlockjd]

I can only speak for America, but this is not treasonous (as of yet).

[PLOlover]

Under the new law about enemy combatants, you can be labeled as such if you go against your allegiance to the US , or something to that effect. It's a stretch, but in 5 or 10 years who knows how it will be construed.

[Chris Alger]

We've arrived at a sad state if this question even needs asking. Of course there's no law against dissauding people from entering the military. Any efforts of this sort would almost certainly fall within the ambit of the first amendment.

[ShakeZula06]

wiki just an excerpt not the whole thing-
[ QUOTE ]
To avoid the abuses of the English law (including executions by Henry VIII of those who criticized his repeated marriages), treason was specifically defined in the United States Constitution, the only crime so defined. Article Three defines treason as levying war against the United States or "in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort," and requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or a confession in open court for conviction. Congress has, at times, passed statutes creating treason-like offense with different names (such as sedition in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, or espionage and sabotage in the 1917 Espionage Act) that do not require the testimony of two witnesses and have a much broader definition than Article Three treason. For example, some well-known spies have been convicted of espionage rather than treason.

The Constitution does not itself create the offense; it only restricts the definition. The crime is prohibited by legislation passed by Congress. Therefore the United States Code at 18 U.S.C. § 2381 states "whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States." The requirement of testimony of two witnesses was inherited from the British Treason Act 1695.

[/ QUOTE ]
Everything except the bolded part got to give you a comfortable feeling. God damn the founders were smart. While the bolded part may not have been abused yet, I wouldn't doubt to see them abused in the future.

[betgo]

The Alien Sedition Act in the Adams Administration and the Espionage Act in World War I both resulted in the imprisonment of people for opposing government policy. The Alien and Sedition Act contributed to the unpopularity of Adams and the Federalists.

Generally, people have not been prosecuted for political crimes in the United States. However, how far free speech and free press went was less clear in the early United States and in time of war.

[MidGe]

It went beyond that people were imprisoned for their genetic heritage only, in the US during WWII.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
"While the bolded part may not have been abused yet"

[/ QUOTE ]
They've ben abused over and over. Gene Debs got 20 years under the Espionage Act for giving a speech in a park criticizing the draft. Abuses of these statutes and their state counterparts form the core of the law regarding political expression under the first amendment. The constitutionality of these statutes has always been in doubt.

[Jimbo]

Where did you come up with this fantasy?

Gene Debs

Jimbo

[betgo]

From wikipedia entry on Eugene Debs [ QUOTE ]
On June 16, 1918, Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was convicted, sentenced to serve ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life.

Debs made his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs appealed his conviction to the United States Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the Court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I. While Debs had carefully guarded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he still had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war. Among other things, the Court cited Debs's praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs' case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the Court had upheld a similar conviction.


Debs in the Atlanta PenitentiaryHe went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists to march on May 1 (May Day), 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day Riots of 1919.

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 913,664 votes (3.4%), the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. and slightly more than he had won in 1912, when he obtained six percent of the vote. This stint in prison also inspired Debs to write a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system, which appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and was collected into his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters (published posthumously).

On December 25, 1921, President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served. Debs, however, never recovered his health from that time in prison and died five years later at the age of 70 in Elmhurst, Illinois.


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