Treason

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In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one's nation or state. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor. Oran's Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: "...[a]...citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation]." In many nations, it is also often considered treason to attempt or conspire to overthrow the government, even if no foreign country is aided or involved by such an endeavour.

Traitor may also mean a person who betrays (or is accused of betraying) their own political party, family, friends, ethnic group, religion, or other group to which they may belong. Oftentimes, such accusations are controversial and disputed, as the person may not identify with the group of which they are a member, or may otherwise disagree with the group leaders making the charge. See, for example, race traitor.

At times, the term "traitor" has been levelled as a political epithet, regardless of any verifiable treasonous action. In a civil war or insurrection, the winners may deem the losers to be traitors. Likewise the term "traitor" is used in heated political discussion – typically as a slur against political dissidents, or against officials in power who are perceived as failing to act in the best interest of their constituents. In certain cases, as with the German Dolchstosslegende, the accusation of treason towards a large group of people can be a unifying political message.

Figures in history who are renowned for acts of treachery have subsequently had their names become synonymous with the word "traitor"; eg. Judas, Benedict Arnold, Pétain and Quisling

1 United Kingdom
- 1.1 History
2 United States
3 List of people convicted of treason, by country
4 See also
5 External links
6 Further reading

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United Kingdom

Image:Merge-arrows.gif It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with High treason in the United Kingdom. (Discuss)

The British law of treason is entirely statutory and has been so since the Treason Act 1351 (25 Edw. 3 St. 5 c. 2), which is unusual in English Criminal Law. The Act is written in Norman French, but is more commonly cited in its English translation.

The Treason Act 1351 has since been amended several times, and currently provides for four categories of treasonable offences, namely:

"when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the King, or of our lady his Queen or of their eldest son and heir";
"if a man do violate the King’s companion, or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the wife of the King’s eldest son and heir";
"if a man do levy war against our lord the King in his realm, or be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the realm, or elsewhere, and thereof be probably attainted of open deed by the people of their condition"; and
"if a man slea the chancellor, treasurer, or the King’s justices of the one bench or the other, justices in eyre, or justices of assise, and all other justices assigned to hear and determine, being in their places, doing their offices".

Another Act, the Treason Act 1702 (1 Anne stat. 2 c. 21), provides for a fifth category of treason, namely:

"if any person or persons ... shall endeavour to deprive or hinder any person who shall be the next in succession to the crown ... from succeeding after the decease of her Majesty (whom God long preserve) to the imperial crown of this realm and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging".

In addition to the crime of treason, the Treason Felony Act 1848 created various offences known as treason felony. Under the traditional categorisation of offences into treason, felonies and misdemeanours, treason felony was merely another form of felony. While the common law offences of misprision and compounding were abolished in respect of felonies (including treason felony) by the Criminal Law Act 1967, which abolished the distinction between misdemeanour and felony, misprision of treason and compounding of treason are still offences under the common law.

During the Second World War, the crime of treachery was created under the Treachery Act 1940, with the death penalty being the mandatory sentence, [1]. Anyone who spied for Germany, committed sabotage or otherwise aided the enemy was liable to be prosecuted for treachery, which was easier to prove than high treason because allegiance to the Crown did not have to be proven. 17 people were hanged or shot for treachery during the war. The Treachery Act 1940 was repealed in England and Wales by the Criminal Law Act 1967.

By virtue of the Treason Act 1708, the law of treason in Scotland is the same as the law in England, save that in Scotland counterfeiting the Great Seal of Scotland (the Forgery Act 1861 (see below) did not apply to Scotland) and the slaying of the Lords of Session and Lords of Justiciary were adjudged treason.

The penalty for treason was changed to a maximum of imprisonment for life in 1998 under the Crime And Disorder Act. Before 1998, the death penalty was mandatory, subject to the Royal Prerogative of Mercy. William Joyce was the last person to be put to death for treason in 1946.

As to who can commit treason, it depends on the ancient notion of allegiance. As such, British citizens (and British subjects who were Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies) wherever they may owe allegiance to The Queen as do aliens present in the United Kingdom at the time of the treasonable act (except diplomats and foreign invading forces), those who hold a British passport however obtained, and by aliens who - having lived in Britain and gone abroad again - have left behind family and belongings.

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History

The Treason Act 1351 formerly distinguished two varieties of treason: high treason and petty treason. High treason was punishable by death; if executed, the traitor's property would escheat to the Crown. Individuals convicted of petty treason surrendered property to their immediate Lord. The murder of one's lawful superior, i.e. a servant killing his master, a wife her husband or anyone his or her prelate, amounted to petty treason. High treason covered acts that constituted a serious threat to the stability or continuity of the state.

The fifth category of treasonable offences, namely counterfeiting money or the King's Seal, was abolished in England by the Forgery Act 1861 and the Coinage Act 1861, and in Scotland by the Treason Act 1945. The 1351 Act originally also provided that if new treasonable acts not listed in the Act arose they could be referred to the King and Parliament, who would determine whether the act constituted treason or merely some other felony.

The punishment for treason was in former times typically an extended and especially cruel death. This remained unreformed until the 19th century. Previously, any method (in theory) could be legally used to carry out the death penalty – most popular in the middle ages were hanging, drawing and quartering. The requirement that the body be hung, drawn and quartered was repealed by the Forfeiture Act 1870, although the dismemberment of the body had been posthumous since 1814 (see Treason Act 1814).

A notable treason trial occurred at the Old Bailey in 1916 when Sir Roger Casement was accused of siding with Germany in World War I for his role in the Easter Uprising in Ireland. The charge against him said he tried to encourage Irish soldiers in the British Army to desert and fight for Germany as means of securing Irish freedom. Casement tried to argue that as an Irishman, he was a foreigner and could not be tried in an English court. This argument failed because he had been in the employment of the British Government as a diplomat for almost all of his adult life and had accepted a Knighthood and a pension from the British Government on his retirement in 1911. He was hanged in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916 and is regarded as a martyr by the Irish Republican movement to this day. His case is often cited as a classic example of the politically divisive aspect of the crime of treason.

The last execution for treason in the United Kingdom was held in 1946. William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw) stood accused of levying war against King George VI by travelling to Germany in the early months of World War II and taking up employment as a broadcaster of pro-Nazi propaganda to British radio audiences. He was awarded a personal commendation by Hitler in 1944 for his contribution to the German war effort. On his capture at the end of the war, Parliament rushed through the Treason Act 1945 (1945 c.44) to facilitate a trial that would have the same procedure as a trial for murder. Before the Act, a trial for treason short of regicide involved an elaborate and lengthy medieval procedure. Although Joyce was born in the United States to Irish parents, he had moved to Britain in his teens and applied for a British passport in 1933 which was still valid when he defected to Germany and so under the law he owed allegiance to Britain. He appealed against conviction to the House of Lords on the grounds he had lied about his country of birth on the passport application and did not owe allegiance to any country at the beginning of the war. The appeal was not upheld and he was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946.

It is thought the strength of public feeling against Joyce as a perceived traitor was the driving force behind his prosecution. The only evidence offered at his trial that he had begun broadcasting from Germany while his British passport was valid was the testimony of a London police inspector who had questioned him before the war while he was an active member of the British Union of Fascists and claimed to have recognised his voice on a propaganda broadcast in the early weeks of the war. The burden of proof on the prosecution in any British trial is usually much higher.

Treason, along with piracy with violence and arson in royal dockyards, remained one of the last offences in the United Kingdom that entailed the death penalty after it was abolished for murder in 1965. The death penalty for treason and the other remaining offences was finally abolished by Section 36 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 [2] (1998 c.37).

On 8 August 2005, it was reported that the UK Government was considering bringing prosecutions for treason against a number of British Islamic clerics who have publicly spoken positively about acts of terrorism against civilians in Britain, or attacks on British soldiers abroad, including the 7 July London bombings and numerous attacks on troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. [3] However later that year prosecutors indicted Abu Hamza for inciting murder (he was convicted in February 2006), and it now seems unlikely that anyone will be charged with treason in the forseeable future.

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United States

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 only 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. This safeguard may not be foolproof since Congress has, at times passed statutes creating treasonlike offences with different names (such as sedition in the 1789 Alien and Sedition Acts, or espionage and sabotage in the 1917 Espionage Act) which 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.

In the United States Code, the penalty ranges from "shall suffer death" to "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."

In the history of the United States there have been fewer than 40 federal prosecutions for treason and even fewer convictions. Several men were convicted of treason in connection with the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion but were pardoned by President George Washington. The most famous treason trial, that of Aaron Burr in 1807, resulted in acquittal. Politically motivated attempts to convict opponents of the Jeffersonian Embargo Acts and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 all failed.

Significantly, after the American Civil War, no person involved with the Confederate States of America was charged with treason, and only one major Confederate official—the commandant of the Andersonville prison, who was charged with war crimes—was charged with anything at all. The decision not to prosecute Confederates was mostly due to the words and actions of President Abraham Lincoln, who considered peace and unity more important than vengeance. During the war, Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty for Confederates, and in his second inaugural address (1865) pleaded for a reconciliation "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Several people generally thought of as traitors in the United States, such as Jonathan Pollard, the Walker Family, Robert Soblen, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were not prosecuted for treason, but rather for espionage—possibly because the foreign countries involved (Israel and the USSR) were considered allies of the U.S. at the time the spying took place. John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" fighter in Afghanistan, was also thought of as a traitor by many. However, instead of being tried for treason, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder US nationals, aiding the Taliban and terrorist offences relating to Al Qaeda, even though he joined the Taliban during the period before September 11, 2001 when the United States was aiding the Taliban to help their destruction of the opium crop.

Senator Joseph McCarthy referred to "twenty years of treason" (1933–1953, the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman) when numerous communist spy rings involving hundreds of agents were operating inside the United States government. As documented in the VENONA papers, these rings included the Rosenbergs ring, the Perlo group, the Nathan Silvermaster group, the Harold Ware group, the Jacob Golos group, the Karl group, etc.

Thanks to the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, much more has been learned about these rings which were more widespread than was known at the time. For example, it has been revealed that U.S. Representative Samuel Dickstein was on the Soviet payroll for several years while he was investigating anti-Communist activities, including the little-known Business Plot against FDR. Claims have been made that the communist spying even included J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project and known for his leftist politics, who had his security clearance revoked in the mid-1950s. In fact, there was no evidence in the archives substantially linking Oppenheimer to any acts of espionage or treason, although this theory has been promoted by various right-wing and anti-Semitic organizations.

Most states have provisions in their constitutions or statutes similar to those in the U.S. Constitution. There have been only two successful prosecutions for treason on the state level, that of Thomas Dorr in Rhode Island and that of John Brown in Virginia, although his raid and trial took place in Jefferson County in what is now West Virginia.

In 1964, the anti-Communist activist John A. Stormer wrote a book called None Dare Call It Treason, which unexpectedly sold seven million copies with little or no advertising. The title phrase comes from a 17th-century epigram by John Harington:

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

This phrase refers to treason defined as attempting to overthrow the government. Since its popularization by Stormer, it has been reused and paraphrased many times and has become part of popular culture.

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