Are These Protests Treason ???

Or Freedom Of Speech

In the 1790s, opposition political parties were new and not fully accepted. Government leaders often considered their opponents to be some sort of traitors. Historian Ron Chernow reports that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and President George Washington "regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature." When an undeclared Quasi-War broke out with France in 1797-98, "Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason and engaged in hyperbole." Furthermore, the Jeffersonian opposition party behaved the same way.
After 1801, with a peaceful transition in the political party in power, the rhetoric of "treason" against political opponents diminished. Vermont is the only U.S. state to have abolished capital punishment for all crimes except treason.

Federal

To avoid the abuses of the English law, treason was specifically defined in the United States Constitution, the only crime so defined. Article III, section 3 reads as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

However, Congress has passed laws creating related offenses that punish conduct that undermines the government or the national security, such as sedition in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, or espionage and sedition in the 1917 Espionage Act, which do not require the testimony of two witnesses and have a much broader definition than Article Three treason. Some of these laws are still in effect. 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 first paragraph), permits Congress to create the offense, and restricts any punishment for treason to only the convicted (the second paragraph). 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.

Historical cases

One of American history's most notorious traitors is Benedict Arnold, whose name is considered synonymous with the definition of traitor due to his collaboration with the British during the American Revolutionary War. However, this occurred before the Constitution was written. Arnold became a general in the British Army, which protected him.
Since the Constitution came into effect, 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.

Burr trial

The most famous treason trial, that of Aaron Burr in 1807 resulted in acquittal. In 1807, on a charge of treason, Burr was brought to trial before the United States Circuit Court at Richmond, Virginia. The only physical evidence presented to the grand jury was Wilkinson's so-called letter from Burr, which proposed the idea of stealing land in the Louisiana Purchase. The trial was presided over by Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall, acting as a circuit judge. Since no two witnesses testified Burr was acquitted, in spite of the full force of the Jefferson administration's political influence thrown against him. Immediately afterward, Burr was tried on a misdemeanor charge and was again acquitted. Politically motivated attempts to convict opponents of the Jeffersonian Embargo Acts and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 all failed.

Civil War

During the American Civil War, treason trials were held in Indianapolis against Copperheads for conspiring with the Confederacy against the United States. After the war the question was whether the United States government would make indictments for treason against leaders of the Confederate States of America , as many people demanded. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was indicted and held in prison for two years. The indictment was dropped in 1869 when the political scene had changed and it was possible he would be acquitted by a jury in Virginia. When accepting Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, at Appomattox, in April 1865, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assured all Confederate soldiers and officers a blanket amnesty, provided they returned to their homes and refrained from any further acts of hostility, and subsequently other Union generals issued similar terms of amnesty when accepting Confederate surrenders. All Confederate officials received a blanket amnesty issued by President Andrew Johnson as he left office in 1869.

World War 2

In 1949 Iva Toguri D'Aquino was convicted of treason for wartime radio broadcasts (under the name of "Tokyo Rose"), and sentenced to ten years, of which she served six. As a result of prosecution witnesses having lied on oath, she was pardoned in 1977.
In 1952 Tomoya Kawakita, a Japanese-American dual citizen was convicted of treason and sentenced to death for having worked as an interpreter at a Japanese POW camp and having mistreated American prisoners. He was recognized by a former prisoner at a department store in 1946 after having returned to the United States. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. He was released and deported in 1963.

Cold War and after

The Cold War saw frequent talk linking treason with support for Communist-led causes. The most memorable of these came from Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used rhetoric about the Democrats as guilty of "twenty years of treason." As chosen chair of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, McCarthy also investigated various government agencies for Soviet spy rings (see the Venona project); however, he acted as a political fact-finder rather than a criminal prosecutor. The Cold War period saw no prosecutions for explicit treason, but there were convictions and even executions for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, such as in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case.
On October 11, 2006, the United States government charged Adam Yahiye Gadahn for videos in which he appeared as a spokesman for al-Qaeda and threatened attacks on American soil. He was killed on January 19, 2015 in an unmanned aircraft (drone) strike in Waziristan, Pakistan.

What do you have to say??? Our opinion is welcome....

Stay Safe, The Liberals Gone Wild. I thought pot calmed you down???  big grin

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