Death Penalty News

Robert and Michael visited the White House in 1953 in a failed bid to get President Eisenhower to stop their parents’ executions. WASHINGTON -- The sons of convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg returned to the White House on Thursday, more than 50 years after pleading unsuccessfully to spare her life, in a last-ditch appeal to President Obama to exonerate her amid new evidence. Rosenberg was executed in 1953 along with her husband, Julius, after being convicted of conspiring to pass secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. But court records made public last year through a judge’s order cast doubt on the conventional narrative of a Cold War espionage case that captivated the country. “This is our mother we’re talking about,” Robert Meeropol, one of Rosenberg’s two sons, said as he stood outside the White House gates. “Since we can’t bring her back to life, there could be nothing more satisfying to us than to have the government acknowledge that this shouldn’t have happen...

Cartoon by David Sipress, September 26, 2016, The New Yorker There has not been a liberal majority of Justices since Nixon was President. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will change. History, as a rule, unfolds slowly at the Supreme Court. The Justices serve for decades. The cases take years. The Court’s languorous work schedule includes three months of downtime every summer. But the death of Antonin Scalia , earlier this year, jolted the institution and affirmed, once again, a venerable truism, attributed to the late Justice Byron White: “When you change one Justice, you change the whole Court.” For the first time in two generations, the Court’s liberals were ascendant. After many years of liberal Justices struggling to win big cases, suddenly they couldn’t lose them. But this, too, might represent only a brief interregnum. The future of the Supreme Court always depends principally on the outcome of Presidential elections; this year’s race will have a nearly immediate imp...

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl Army charges Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion The Army announced Wednesday that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who disappeared from his unit in Afghanistan in 2009, has been charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, offenses which could send him to prison for life. What punishment could Bergdahl face? Military authorities will have to weigh a range of factors, including what Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl did, the effect on his fellow soldiers and what's best for the U.S. military as a whole. The Department of Defense broke the law when it traded Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for 5 Taliban prisoners in May, the Government Accountability Office said in a legal opinion issued Thursday. While the death penalty is a possible punishment in cases of desertion or misbehavior before the enemy - the charges leveled Tuesday against Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl - that sentence has rarely been imposed. "On the books, it is an option," said Noel Tipo...

Federal District Judge Irving R. Kaufman was a pious man. He visited his synagogue to commune with whatever god he believed in before making up his mind to condemn Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to die in the electric chair, making orphans of their two young boys. That, however, was not the full reach of his piety. Under pressure from the Justice Department to end the Rosenberg case quickly, after two years of delays in the courts, Kaufman set their death for a Friday. This created an unanticipated complication, as Sam Roberts recounts in his grisly description of the execution in " The Brother ": New York State traditionally carried out its executions at 11:00 PM. But this would mean the Rosenbergs would burn several hours into the Sabbath - the Jewish holy day. What to do? Kaufman sought the advice of a rabbi to ascertain the exact time when the Sabbath began, then ordered the executions moved up to a more comfortable hour. The judge must have gotten satisfactory advice, for t...

In a previously unpublished interview, Richard M. Nixon said that Ethel Rosenberg, the convicted spy, might have been spared the death penalty by President Dwight D. Eisenhower had he been aware that evidence against her was tainted. “If I had known — if we had known that at the time — if President Eisenhower had known it, he might have taken a different view with regard to her,” Mr. Nixon, who was Eisenhower’s vice president, is quoted as saying. “In other words, tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.” Mrs. Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953 for conspiring to deliver military secrets to the Soviet Union. “Now if you look at it coolly, in retrospect, at this point,” Mr. Nixon said in a 1983 interview, “certainly we would have preferred that it not be done. But at the time I understand why it was done. And let us understand — Mrs. Rosenberg was guilty. This wasn’t a case of somebody n...