That case involved another infamous incident in American history: the Nazi Saboteur Affair. Cramer was prosecuted for treason for allegedly helping German soldiers who had surreptitiously infiltrated American soil during World War II. On the other hand, a citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy—making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength—but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.
The Constitution also narrowed the scope of punishment for treason as compared to English common law. Under the Constitution, that punishment may not extend beyond the life of the person convicted of treason. Treason prosecutions have essentially disappeared. Although treason was never a popular charge for federal prosecutors, treason prosecutions attended nearly every armed conflict in American history up to and including the Second World War.
Since , however, only one person has been charged with treason against the United States. And that single instance was relatively unusual: in , a federal grand jury indicted Adam Gadahn for treason based on his participation in several al-Qaeda propaganda videos.
Gadahn was not in custody at the time of his indictment, and he was later killed in a drone strike in Pakistan before he could stand trial in the United States. The traditional explanation for why treason charges have vanished is that the Supreme Court in Cramer v. United States made treason so difficult to prove that it was no longer a realistic option for federal prosecutors. But that conventional wisdom is wrong. The Court in Cramer did make treason more difficult to prove than it otherwise could have, but it did not raise the bar so high that treason charges were no longer plausible.
Such resistance seems to have been relatively easy to justify during the reigns of Henry II , Richard I and John , the first and the last of whom were particularly vulnerable to the charge that they themselves were traitors and tyrants In this political climate, there were certainly ways of rebutting the charge that the English barons who fought against John had violated their oaths of fidelity to him and were therefore guilty of treason in the form of infidelitas.
Arguably, William and his associates were exercising this power when they took and held Rochester castle, where they made no attempt to kill or harm the king, whose person and members were exempted from the guerra that Magna Carta empowered the barons to wage against him The same « wave of Romanism » promoted the sacralisation of royal authority 22 and facilitated the application of the law of treason, in the view of H.
Richardson and G. To substantiate this argument, Strickland shows, inter alia , that that Orderic Vitalis and Roger of Wendover applied the word proditio to acts of rebellion and called rebels proditores John Gillingham has reached a similar conclusion about « what the law of treason really was » in medieval England even prior to In practice, a law of Alfred that.
In this sense, i. Furthermore, the Pope commanded the barons in a letter of the same date to renounce the Charter, after castigating them for their previous failure to consider prudently the oath of fealty that they had sworn to the king Since William, along with other barons, not only failed to renounce the Charter but took steps to enforce it, he surely merited condemnation for violating his oath to the king. Even if he and others had defied King John before making war on him, Strickland, among others, argues strongly for rejecting « the idea that rebellion might be placed on some form of legal footing by the act of diffidatio » He also points out that « there was a powerful notion that rebels had violated the sacrosanct bond of fidelity to their lord and deserved fitting retribution » and that kings « consistently claimed the right to execute or mutilate rebels and sometimes exercised it » One may therefore conclude that John was within his rights when he ordered that the nobles be hanged and that Savari did not oppose the executions on account of their illegality.
Why, then, did he object? The valuable discussions of the punishment of traitors by Strickland and Gillingham point to two different though not irreconcilable answers.
Gillingham, like Strickland, insists that in medieval England, « rebellion was always treason » but argues that between the late eleventh and the late thirteenth centuries, English kings did not « execute aristocratic rebels » because of a post-Conquest reception of « chivalry », which he defines as « a secular code of values [ If so, then King John would have had legal grounds for hanging everyone who surrendered to him at Rochester.
But he heeded a reminder from Savari to be chivalrous in dealing with the nobles but not, of course, in his treatment of the ignoble crossbowmen, who were hanged as traitors. This way of accounting for occasions when kings seemingly refrained from executing nobles for treason is perfectly compatible with explaining them by reference to political considerations since there were political advantages that a king could gain by acquiring a reputation for being chivalrous Although this is the word that the statute of employs for treason, modern scholars have given surprisingly little attention to unraveling its meanings when trying to determine what the law of treason amounted to in the territories ruled by Angevin kings, where French, not Latin, would have been the main language for the most important discussions of treason in and out of court For the purpose of determining how treason against the king and treason generally were understood by nobles around the time when the incident related by Wendover took place, there is much to be learned from the History of William Marshal , a poem about an important magnate of the same era that was written a decade or so after the surrender of Rochester castle in When writing about many of the same conflicts that the History discusses, Latin chroniclers such as Roger of Howden, as Gillingham and Strickland demonstrate, denounced as proditores those who fought against kings to whom they owed allegiance and referred to their acts of conspiracy, treason, and infidelity.
Soon afterwards, « the evil, animalistic rage of the traitors proditores burst into flames » and, « raving with diabolical fury, they laid waste with fire and sword the lands of the king of England on both sides of the sea » In , according to Howden, Richard I accused his brother John of proditio , charging that his alliance against him with Philip II was a league with death and an agreement with Hell When in , Gilbert of Guasoil turned over two castles to Philip II and joined with him, he was despised « on account of the treason proditio he had committed against his lord, the King of England » By focusing, in particular, on instances in which the author of the History either used or refrained from using the words « treason » and « traitor » and by examining the normative discourse in terms of which he evaluated nobles and their political conduct, one can identify some broadly shared ideas among nobles about what treason was, who should be called a traitor, and whether making war against a king was treason.
It is also possible to suggest some reasons why these ways of thinking and talking about treason made sense in the political world of William Marshal and possibly better sense than did the discourses of the lawyers and ecclesiastical historians who wrote about treason in Latin.
Even if this story about the Marshal is a myth, it corroborates what other texts tell us about a well-recognized form of treason against the king. The same is true of another episode in the History about the difficulties the Marshal faced by virtue of holding lands from the King of France as well as the King of England. When King John charged that William « had done homage and fidelity to King Philip of France and allied himself with the French king against King John » 62 , William implicitly acknowledged that it would have been treason for him to have done what the king accused him of doing.
The case took a new turn when John ordered William to join him without delay in going to Poitou, where the king planned to regain his own inheritance by attacking the King of France This was an oblique way of both calling the Marshal a traitor and saying that he should forfeit the lands he held from King John. In the name of the king [the bishop] ordered him to send William [de Briouze] to him without making any objection What I have done is to give lodgings to my lord, as I ought to have done, especially since I did not know that the king had any cause to deal with William other than amicably.
And, since I would be betraying him if I turned him over to your hands, I shall escort him all the way until he is outside of my land. The bishop ought not to seek from me that which will leave me open to reproach or which smacks of treason I gave lodgings to my lord, who in great pain and distress landed below the walls of my castle.
When I saw him, I was very pleased to welcome him, for I had no idea whatever that I was doing wrong, since he was my friend and my lord and I had never heard say that you had quarreled with him. You were both on very good terms when I left England and came to these shores The king « saw that he could do no more […] he asked him for hostages », which the Marshal provided Instead of stating clearly that all such men committed treason against the royal lords whom they abandoned and thereby distinguishing clearly between infidelity to a king and fidelity, the History characterizes and classifies them in ways that are best explained by situating them, for purposes of analysis, on an imaginary continuum on which one can make subtler distinctions about how loyal or disloyal a man was.
One may think of the continuum as extending all the way from that paragon of loyalty and honor, William Marshal, to men who « turned » from kings without necessarily betraying them, to men who truly committed treason against kings, and, finally, to the worst traitors of all, who were those who committed treason, not against any king, but against William Marshal himself.
Between the Marshal and those who committed treason against the king were several kinds of men who were not perfectly loyal but still did not commit treason. The farther from William Marshal the men are situated on the continuum, the greater the personal responsibility assigned to them for their failure to be completely loyal to their kings.
Nevertheless, how the text evaluates these men is not always a function of their conduct alone. It also depends, in certain cases, on how much responsibility and what kind of responsibility the author assigns to the royal lord whom they abandoned and to the king with whom they became affiliated.
Whether the evaluation of the men on the continuum should be considered legal or moral, it was certainly normative and could have practical consequences for how others treated them. But the Marshal, at least, whose heart was whole and untainted, was with him when things were tough and hard; never did he disavow [John], never did he have a change of heart, he served him in good faith as his lord and king.
Not once did he leave him until death took the king away, and I can say that at the risk of life or death, he was always with him or his men, as a loyal and good man Instead, the author simply implies that the Marshal was more loyal and honorable than they were.
In the middle of our continuum, between the Marshal and the veritable traitors, are those who « turned », as the author often puts it, from this king to that king, and those who were « turned » by this king from that king. Turning was not necessarily treason, nor was it always treason to be turned. But there were better and worse forms of turning or being turned; and at its worst, turning surely was treason.
Nearest to the Marshal on the continuum are the nobles who turned from a king who had treated them badly to one who treated them well. That the author finds nothing blameworthy or shameful in the conduct of the two counts is clear from the following story. When the King of France saw them arrive together, he did not find it in the least to his liking, indeed he was very angry. I had in mind talks only with you. Instead, Baldwin and Reginald simply « took their leave of the lord they loved and prepared for their war against the King of France » Even though Philip obviously regarded the two counts as traitors, it was he, the author implies, who incurred blame and shame for driving them to abandon him.
As a consequence of the ill-treatment that William des Roches received from the king, who had broken an agreement with him, William « turned to the king of France » Indeed, I know that in this way he lost the hearts of the barons of the land » Arrest warrants are issued by a judge after a showing of probable cause. Under the protection of the bankruptcy court, debtors may discharge their debts, perhaps by paying a portion of each debt.
Bankruptcy judges preside over these proceedings. In a jury trial, the jury decides the facts. Defendants will occasionally waive the right to a jury trial and choose to have a bench trial.
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