[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 20



NEBRASKA:

ACLU of Nebraska Secures $400,000 Grant to Fight Death Penalty Referendum



The ACLU of Nebraska announced today that it recently secured a $400,000 grant 
from a national funder, Proteus Action League, to fight back against the death 
penalty referendum. The ACLU of Nebraska has donated these funds to Nebraskans 
for Public Safety to conduct fraud watch, grassroots engagement, and public 
education efforts.

Statement from Danielle Conrad, Executive Director

"We are honored to have national support to end Nebraska???s broken death 
penalty once and for all. This support demonstrates the world is watching what 
is happening here this summer. This support will be like rocket fuel to the 
campaign. This funding will ensure a thoughtful public education effort informs 
Nebraskans when they make a decision about whether or not to sign petitions to 
revive a broken death penalty. We know many Nebraskans stand with us and want 
our state to move forward with smart alternatives that put public safety first 
while turning our attention to more positive statewide priorities like 
education and tax relief."

###

ACLU of Nebraska was founded almost fifty years ago and its diverse statewide 
membership works in courts, the legislature and our communities to defend and 
preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of 
the United States and Nebraska guarantee everyone in this state. For more 
information, please visit: www.aclunebraska.org

(source: aclunebraska.org)

******************

Amid uncertainty over death penalty repeal, lawyers ask to continue 
representing John Lotter----Man on death row in 'Boys Don't Cry' case is 
engaged to be married



Legal arguments over Nebraska???s death penalty repeal have quickly emerged in 
a federal court case involving 1 of the state's death row inmates.

2 Kansas City attorneys argued this week that John Lotter's death sentence was 
negated by the Nebraska Legislature's May 27 repeal of capital punishment.

But lawyers Rebecca Woodman and Carol Camp said their client remains under 
threat of execution while a referendum petition drive attempts to overturn the 
repeal law, and Gov. Pete Ricketts pushes for the lethal injections of Lotter 
and the nine other men on death row. For that reason, the attorneys asked to 
remain assigned to Lotter's case.

"Although Mr. Lotter asserts that the U.S. and Nebraska Constitutions would bar 
his execution even if the governor and his group were able to repeal the 
repeal, it is clear the governor will keep attempting to execute him until the 
courts definitively say he may not. That moment has not yet arrived," the 
attorneys stated in a court brief filed in U.S. District Court in Lincoln.

In response, Assistant Nebraska Attorney General James Smith argued that only 
the Nebraska Board of Pardons has the authority to commute a death sentence 
under the state's Constitution. Smith contended that lawmakers passed flawed 
legislation by including intent language that says the repeal should apply to 
the existing death row inmates.

"If the act was an unconstitutional power grab by the Nebraska Legislature, 
Lotter???s final death sentence remains in effect," Smith said in his brief.

Attorney General Doug Peterson also has said he will ask the Nebraska Supreme 
Court to decide whether the repeal law should apply to the state's 10 death row 
inmates. That request could be made as soon as September.

Lotter, 44, has spent 19 years on death row for a triple homicide near Humboldt 
on New Year's Eve in 1993. One of the victims was targeted for being 
transgender, which inspired the film "Boys Don't Cry."

Lotter lost his previous appeals before state and federal courts. That makes 
him and Carey Dean Moore - convicted of killing 2 Omaha cab drivers in 1979 - 
the top candidates for execution depending on what happens with the repeal law.

As of now, however, Nebraska lacks the means to carry out an execution. 2 of 
the 3 drugs required in the state's lethal injection protocol have expired, and 
federal officials have said they will block the state's attempt to import at 
least one of the drugs.

Woodman and Camp, who work with the Death Penalty Litigation Clinic, pointed 
out that no other state has executed an inmate after repealing the death 
penalty. To do so "would represent the sort of random, arbitrary, purposeless 
extinction of human life that the Eighth Amendment forbids," they said in their 
brief.

The 2 have asked U.S. District Senior Judge Richard Kopf to allow them to 
continue to represent Lotter while the status of the death penalty remains 
uncertain. They indicated Lotter has been pursuing constitutional claims never 
before litigated that would invalidate his death sentence.

Smith agreed that the attorneys should remain on the case, but only for the 
purposes of helping Lotter seek clemency from the Pardons Board, made up of 
Peterson, Gov. Pete Ricketts and Secretary of State John Gale. That's one of 
the last possible steps before an execution can be carried out.

The judge set a Sept. 15 hearing to hear oral arguments on the case, at which 
time the status of the repeal may be more clear.

(source: omaha.com)

******************

Man's hanging in 1903 was Nebraska's 1st state execution



The state of Nebraska killed its 1st man using a secondhand scaffold from 
Douglas County and a rope special ordered from Chicago.

But even in 1903, capital punishment was under fire in Lincoln.

A central Nebraska senator had introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty, 
long carried out by county sheriffs until the state took over the job earlier 
that year, the Lincoln Journal Star (http://bit.ly/1fjv1Lj ) reported.

And a local woman petitioned Gov. John Mickey, asking him to delay the 
execution until the Legislature adjourned.

Mickey agreed to sign the repeal bill - which had a slim chance of passing - if 
it reached his desk. But he wouldn't halt the hanging.

So at 12:53 p.m. March 13, a 28-year-old convicted murderer from Pierce County 
faced his final punishment in a vacant cell block at the Lincoln penitentiary.

"At that moment 6 prison officers touched an equal number of electric buttons," 
the Lincoln Star reported. "One of them released the trap door.

"Not one of the assistant executioners knows which finger did the deadly work. 
They do not want to know."

Gottlieb Neigenfind was buried in an unmarked grave at Wyuka Cemetery.

A century later, Kellie DeJong unearthed his story from her computer in Pierce 
County.

"I guess we always knew there was a murder in the family," says her mom, 
Vickie.

They didn't realize its historical significance until 2005, when Kellie spent 
the summer researching the case for a 4-H project.

Her findings now fill a 2-inch binder on a bookcase packed with dozens of 
genealogical studies, most of them Vickie's, documenting their family history - 
names like Buckendahl, Doose and Warneke.

One tells the story of 3 brothers, the Herbolsheimers, who emigrated from 
Germany. The oldest ended up in New York. The middle brother in Illinois. The 
youngest in Pierce County.

Kellie also built a Civil War book, which documents the veterans living in the 
area during the 1890s.

But Neigenfind's story is most interesting, says Kellie, now 24.

"It was a lot to take in."

Anna Peters was a mother of 4, the widowed daughter of a well-to-do farmer and 
respected member of the Pierce community, about 20 minutes northwest of 
Norfolk.

News articles describe Neigenfind as "practically friendless," a degenerate 
drunk with little money and an ugly temper. A man who was "easily excited to 
dark deeds by the violence of his passions."

Their marriage lasted five months and five days. Neigenfind blamed her parents 
for the divorce.

On Sept. 11, 1902, he visited her family's farm, demanding to see the son Anna 
had given birth to after they separated.

The family turned him away twice. So he went to town, bought a 5-shot revolver 
and paid them a final visit.

He gunned down the father, Albert Breyer, fired upon the mother, who survived, 
then fatally shot Anna, pulled up her skirt and shot her again.

He attacked Anna's sister, Linda Breyer, on the road as he fled, tearing at her 
clothes.

Dogs and deputies hunted him for days before two men ambushed him on a road 
southeast of Winside, 20 miles east of Pierce.

He emptied his revolver at them, missing with every shot but being made "a 
veritable pepperbox by the guns of his captors," the Lincoln Evening News 
reported the next day.

Behind bars, Neigenfind told reporters he dreamed about the murders before they 
happened.

"My dreams always come true," he said.

Anna Peters would be Kellie DeJong's great-great-great aunt, and Albert Breyer 
her great-great-great grandfather.

Their graves settled long ago into the soil outside St. John's Lutheran Church, 
which greets drivers along Nebraska 98 as they follow the curve into Pierce.

The DeJongs live a quick drive away; this is their church.

But they spend more time at the city cemetery south of town, Prospect View. 
More people are buried there, including family members who didn't belong to St. 
John's.

Vickie likes their stories. Kellie likes the gravestones.

"She's always been a daddy's girl," Vickie says.

"But this is something Mom and I share," says Kellie.

"When I have kids, I want them to know my history."

Her research took her to the county courthouse, to libraries in Pierce and 
Norfolk, and to the State Historical Society in Lincoln. The report won her a 
purple ribbon at the state fair.

Neigenfind's crime falls nearest to their family tree, but a distant cousin is 
serving a life sentence in prison for the 2011 murder of her husband in 
Jefferson County.

And one of the most notorious mass murders in Nebraska history, the 2002 
Norfolk bank shootings, happened just down the road from Pierce.

That, more than anything, is why the DeJongs support the death penalty.

"I'm in favor of it, and if you talk to people around town here, there's a lot 
of them that are," Kellie said.

Hangings didn't always work, she said. But a century ago it took months - at 
most a few years - to carry out a death sentence.

"It was nice to have everything go bang-bang-bang right off the bat."

Neigenfind dreamed about his trial, too. And about the gallows.

The night before his hanging, 6 months after his crimes, he asked a prison 
guard, John Burke, what it means to be born again.

It means to be reborn of spirit, not flesh, the guard told him.

"Well, I'll tell you John," Neigenfind replied. "You go to the phone Saturday 
morning and I'll call you up and tell you all about the other world."

The prisoner slept in the following morning. He ate beefsteak, eggs, broiled 
mackerel and cocoa for breakfast, bathed and shaved, and put on his suit.

Someone read him his death warrant.

He met with a minister, shook hands with reporters and friends.

Women from the Salvation Army brought him roses, wept, and asked if they'd see 
him in heaven. He said yes.

The Pierce County sheriff visited, and told the condemned man he was glad his 
ghost wouldn't be able to shoot anyone back home. Neigenfind laughed.

He lunched on boiled beef with horseradish and buttered bread.

A hundred yards away, men joked and smoked cigars.

"Some mounted the steps and stood upon the trap door," the Lincoln Star 
reported. "Others fingered the rope and the push-buttons, one of which was to 
send a man into eternity.

"The levity did not last long, however. As the time approached for the 
condemned man to enter the cell house a degree of seriousness came over the 
little crowd."

A few dozen people - 8 executioners, seven reporters, six doctors, witnesses 
and prison officials - watched as one guard bound Neigenfind's ankles, another 
slipped a black hood over his head and a 3rd fixed the rope around his neck, 
the knot resting behind his ear.

The warden signaled it was time.

"The man's neck was broken by the fall, but it is very doubtful if he felt any 
pain," the Evening News reported. "The horror of it lay in the deliberate, 
brutalizing character of the whole affair."

Neigenfind hanged for 15 minutes before being cut down.

Prison staff turned him over to an undertaker, E. L. Troyer, who had offered to 
embalm Neigenfind and furnish a casket if he got possession of the body.

The next day, hundreds of men, women and children flowed through Troyer's 
parlor on South 11th Street to see the corpse. One boy, under 12, pushed his 
bicycle down the street and shouted, "Did you see the man that was hung?"

The police chief and the mayor tried to stop the public viewing, but Troyer 
persisted until the governor intervened.

Back at the prison, Neigenfind's name was "on the lips of every officer, 
employee and prisoner."

Pranksters even called Burke, the guard, that Saturday morning, claiming to be 
Neigenfind and ready to relate his experience from the beyond.

The scaffold was dismantled and placed in storage, the Evening News reported.

"If the bill abolishing capital punishment passes it will be serviceable for 
firewood if the state runs short."

More likely, though, it would be used again later that year:

"Billy Rhea, the murderer of Herman Zahn of Snyder, Dodge County, is in the 
prison with the prospect of swinging ahead of him."

(source: Associated Press)








USA:

Conviction, death sentence upheld in 2001 Navajo double-murder



An appeals court Friday upheld a federal death-row inmate's conviction and 
sentence in the grisly 2001 beating and stabbing murders of a woman and her 
9-year-old granddaughter on the Navajo Nation.

Lezmond Mitchell had argued that defense attorneys at his trial and sentencing 
were ineffective, but the majority of a 3-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit 
Court of Appeals disagreed.

The court said Mitchell's attorneys were "thorough in the extreme" and had to 
make difficult choices to construct a defense in a crime of "unusual 
brutality."

But in a harsh dissent, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said Mitchell deserves a new 
sentencing hearing because the defense strategy of depicting him as a "good 
guy" to jurors was "no strategy at all."

Reinhardt said Mitchell was sentenced to death through a legal loophole and 
that "those with the greatest stake" in the case - the victims' family and the 
Navajo Nation - all opposed Mitchell's execution.

Mitchell, 33, is the only Native American on the federal death row, according 
to the Death Penalty Information Center. Reinhardt said Mitchell could "suffer 
the ignominious fate of becoming the 1st person to be executed for an 
intra-Indian crime that occurred in Indian country."

The case began when Mitchell, Johnny Orsinger and others plotted to steal a 
vehicle to use later to rob a trading post on the Navajo Nation. On Oct. 28, 
2001, Mitchell and Orsinger abducted Alyce Slim, 63, and her 9-year-old 
granddaughter, in Slim???s GMC pickup truck.

Court documents say that somewhere near Sawmill, the men stabbed Slim 33 times, 
killing her and dumping her in the back of the truck, where they forced the 
granddaughter to sit with the body.

Some time later, they dragged Slim out of the truck and told the girl to "lay 
down and die," when Mitchell cut her throat twice. When she did not die, both 
men dropped heavy rocks on her head, killing her.

The two drove off, but returned a short time later to cover their tracks, 
burying their victims' heads and hands in a hole and dragging their dismembered 
torsos into the woods before burning the victims' clothes and belongings.

3 days later, Mitchell and 2 other men robbed the Red Rock Trading Post at 
gunpoint, driving off in Slim's truck, which they later burned.

Mitchell was eventually convicted on 11 counts, including 2 counts of 
1st-degree murder, carjacking resulting in death and robbery, among others. He 
could not be executed for the murders under federal and Navajo law - but 
because carjacking falls under another section of federal law, he could face 
the death penalty for that.

The Navajo Nation opposed a death sentence as did the victims' families, 
swaying the U.S. Attorney for Arizona at the time to decide against a capital 
case. But Reinhardt said that decision was overruled by then-Attorney General 
John Ashcroft and the death penalty was sought.

Defense experts determined that Mitchell had mental and emotional problems and 
a distant mother, that he had substance-abuse issues and was likely abused as a 
child.

But the experts also described him as a borderline sociopath who denied he was 
intoxicated at the time of the killing, who talked calmly about killing the 
girl and who had a history of "swinging dogs and cats by their tails and then 
throwing them off bridges just for fun."

The appeals court said Mitchell's attorneys "had to walk a very careful line to 
avoid opening the door to the highly damaging" experts' reports.

Rather than risk that, by introducing evidence of his upbringing that could 
explain his behavior, they built a defense on three themes: That Mitchell's 
life had value and was worth saving, that Orsinger was the mastermind but had 
not been sentenced to death, and that the Navajo Nation did not want Mitchell 
executed.

"Considering the unusual brutality of these crimes ... it is a remarkable 
tribute to Mitchell's lawyers that they were able to get the jury to find 
several mitigating factors," the appeals court said. "There is no showing that 
Mitchell's lawyers' strategy was unreasonable."

But where the majority saw "effective assistance," Reinhardt saw only a 
"worthless and implausible 'good guy' defense" that ignored all the elements 
that could have swayed a juror to vote against the death penalty.

Reinhardt said that federal executions are rare and reserved for crimes that 
have national significance, like the Boston Marathon or Oklahoma City bombers. 
He said Mitchell - who was 20 at the time of the killings and did not have a 
criminal record - "committed a horrible crime (but) it was hardly one of 
national import or of particular federal interest other than the fact that it 
involved the Navajo Nation."

Calls to prosecutors and to Mitchell's attorneys were not immediately returned 
Friday.

(source: Cronkite News)

*************

Moral Courage in the Face of Death----State Power and the Execution of the 
Rosenbergs



Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the 1st and only American civilians to be 
executed for espionage, electrocuted at the Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, NY, 
62 years ago, on June 19, 1953. The couple was, according to the New York 
Times, "stoic and tight-lipped to the end ...." They "went to their deaths with 
a composure that astonished the witnesses."

We should take a moment on the 19th to remember the Rosenbergs. Their murders 
should be remembered as much for the lives lost as for what their 
state-sanctioned killings reveal about how far the U.S. government will go to 
destroy those persecuted as national-security threats. The Rosenbergs were 
ostensibly executed for being spies for the Soviet Union (SU). Julius was a 
low-level Soviet operative, a currier of non-threatening U.S. atomic-energy 
information. Ethel was a former Communist Party member, Brooklyn housewife and 
mother of their 2 boys; she was sympathetic to her husband's activities but 
likely played no role in them.

They were victims of Cold War hysteria, spectacles in the exercise of power. 
They were executed for refusing to participate in the public ritual of 
contrition, of bowing in loyal subjugation. They were killed for refusing to 
name names, identifying other alleged communists. The Times reported, "Both 
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, however, maintained they were completely innocent 
and had nothing to confess."

The Cold War is long over and the worst of the post-9/11 terrorist hysteria is 
dissipating. 2 recent developments are illustrative of this changing political 
climate: (i) the defeat the reauthorization of the Patriot Act and (ii) the 
widespread popular opposition to recommitting a large number of U.S. ground 
troops to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State. A new anti-imperialism, 
anti-interventionism promoted by the libertarian right and the progressive left 
seems to be growing among Americans.

The U.S. government has limited domestic security threats to 2 types of cases: 
(i) jihadists (e.g., Tsarnaev brothers) and (iii) whistleblowers (e.g., Edward 
Snowden). With the exception of Chelsea Manning, who received 35 years, those 
convicted for being national-security threats received moderate federal 
penitentiary time. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's recent death-penalty verdict in the 
Boston Marathon attacks demonstrates how far the U.S. government will go in its 
war against a domestic national-security threat.

Political trials in the U.S., like those of the old SU and China today, are 
public spectacles. The government uses the courtroom, along with the 
accompanying punishment, to further a political agenda, enforcing an 
ideological message that re-enforces the power of the state. Tyranny is 
exercised through the rituals of trial and punishment, promote as mass 
distraction by the corporate media No example of the exercise of such power is 
more gruesomely expressed then in the executions of the Rosenbergs. * * *

The Rosenbergs' executions took place on their 14th wedding anniversary. 
Earlier that day, the couple was informed that both the Supreme Court and Pres. 
Dwight Eisenhower had rejected the final appeals to spare their lives. Their 
meals for that day were simple: for breakfast, cereal (with milk and sugar) and 
coffee; for lunch, frankfurters with sauerkraut and boiled potatoes; and for 
dinner, meat with tomato sauce, mashed potato, bread with apple butter and iced 
tea.

They were permitted to spend 2 90-minute sessions together, in the afternoon 
and early evening, but separated by a wire fence. At 7:30 pm, they were 
returned to their respective cells and prepared for execution. The Times 
reported, "Because of the rapid developments in the case they did not get the 
special dinner normally granted to prisoners about to die."

Julius was the 1st to face execution. He entered what's been described as the 
"white-walled death chamber" wearing white trousers, a brown T-shirt and 
leather slippers, his familiar mustache shaved off and glasses removed. The 
prison chaplain, Rabbi Irving Koslowe, accompanied him, chanting the 23rd 
Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." A leather mask was hung 
over his face and he was placed in the oak electric chair. At 8:04 pm, he 
received the 1st of 3 jolts of 2,000 volts of electricity; at 8:06 pm, Dr. H. 
W. Kipp pronounced Julius Rosenberg dead.

Shortly following the removal of Julius' body from the death chamber, Ethel was 
brought in. The Times notes that she "wore a dark green dress with polka dots 
and .... Her hair was close-cropped on top to permit contact with an 
electrode." Days earlier, Ethel's mother, Tessie Greenglass, visited her at the 
death house and, allegedly, suggested she divorce her husband and name names. 
"You'll burn," Mrs. Greenglass reputedly warned.

2 women accompanied Ethel to the death chamber, Mrs. Helen Evans, a prison 
matron, and Mrs. Lucy Many, a prison telephone operator and former matron. Most 
moving, Rosenberg grasped Evans' hand and "drew her close and kissed her 
lightly on the cheek." According to the Times, Evans "choked up at the final 
farewell and left the room quickly." Ethel shook Mrs. Many's hand, a final 
farewell, and departed. Rabbi Koslowe intoned the 15th and 31st Psalms. He 
turned to Ethel and asked, "Julius is gone. Do you have any names?"; she 
insisted she had none. Sitting placidly in the electric chair, guards placed a 
leather mask over her face and, at 8:11 pm, she received 3 successive jolts of 
electricity. However, the initial 3 2,000-volt shocks failed to kill her and 
she required 2 additional jolts before, at 8:16 pm, Ethel Rosenberg was 
pronounced dead.

Federal agents arrested Julius 3 year earlier, on June 17, 1950, on suspicion 
of conspiracy of espionage. The bust took place after his brother-in-law, David 
Greenglass, a former machinist at the Los Alamos atomic-bomb development site, 
named him as passing secret information - including a crude sketch of an 
implosion-type nuclear weapon design - to the Soviet Union (SU) through a 
courier, Harry Gold. 2 months later, on August 11, 1950, Ethel was seized.

The Rosenbergs' espionage trial - along with their co-defendant, Morton Sobell 
- commenced on March 6, 1951, at the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square, now 
renamed after Justice Thurgood Marshall. The defendants were found guilt March 
29th and on April 5th Judge Irving Kaufman imposed the death sentence on the 
couple and a 30-year prison sentence on Sobell. 2 years later, the Rosenbergs 
were executed. Ethel spent a total of 801 days on death row at Sing Sing, while 
Julius spent 767 days; the Justice Department reported that the costs for the 
imprisonment, trial and executions of the Rosenbers totaled $150,000; $1.3 
million in 2015 dollars.

In 1995, the U.S. government released what are known as the Venona documents, 
four decades after the Rosenbergs were executed. The files reveal a 
50-year-long program run by the U.S. Army Signal Security Agency monitoring 
Soviet telegram traffic. Sam Roberts, writing in the New York Times, reported 
that Venona "incriminated Julius. ... Ethel's role in the entire affair remains 
less certain." The files revealed that an estimated 350 Americans worked for 
the SU.

Roberts' notes that Sobell said, "the true reasons for Ethel's arrest are at 
least partly accurate, as the prosecutors had hoped that threatening her with a 
death sentence would eventually pressure Julius to confess." Most disturbing, 
during the Rosenbergs trial, the federal government failed to provide the 
judge, the prosecution or the defense with the Verona records. The failure to 
reveal such critical information profoundly comprised the case, contributing to 
the execution of 2 American citizens. In all likelihood, the information would 
have spared both Rosenbergs, with Julius serving a prison term and Ethel 
released. In 2008, Greenglass, who served 10 years of a 15-year sentence, 
recanted his trial testimony, claiming he perjured himself.

* * *

The Rosenbergs case was a Cold War melodrama. In February 1950, a senior atomic 
bomb scientist, Klaus Fuchs, was arrested in London and charged with espionage. 
He named names, particularly the secret-information courier, Gold. In May '50, 
the FBI arrested Gold who, in tern, named Greenglass who was picked up in June. 
A month later, Julius was arrested and, in August, his wife was seized. Neither 
Rosenberg named names.

The case played out against a background of deepening anticommunism at home and 
abroad. At home, Congressional hearings by the House Un-American Activities 
Committee (HUAC) and by Senators Joseph McCarthy and Estes Kefauver made all 
Americans possible national-security threats. Internationally, 3 pivotal events 
marked the postwar era: (i) the SU detonated its 1st atomic bomb on September 
23, 1949; (ii) a week later, on October 1st, Mao's communist forces took power 
in China, finally victorious in a civil war against the Kuomintang-led 
government that began in 1927; and (iii) the Korean War started in June 1950. 
U.S. postwar global hegemony was being challenged, setting the stage for the 
next half-century's Cold War. Someone had to pay.

The Rosenbergs trial was a classic, all-too-noir political morality tale. Every 
one accused of espionage named names - except the Rosenbergs. During the trial, 
they held fast to their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination; they 
refused to name names, even in the face of death. Reflecting on his conviction 
and sentence, Julius warned:

This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a 
Rosenberg Case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in 
America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to 
be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war 
budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell 
them that you are no longer gonna give 5 years for a Smith Act prosecution or 
one year for Contempt of Court, but we're gonna kill ya!

The Rosenbergs went to their death proclaiming their innocence, refusing to 
name names. They also, as reported by the New York Herald Tribune, "died 
paupers," leaving their children only some books and painful memories.

Now, 62 years after the Rosenbergs executions, the U.S. is poised for a new 
political crisis. Economically, restructuring is underway; the U.S. remains 
dominant but stagnant as the world economy is shifting east. Politically, the 1 
percent is consolidating control over the nation-state, particularly at the 
state level. Militarily, innumerable failed confrontations, while restricted to 
the periphery of the empire, serve as distractions to the mounting domestic 
crisis. And the security-intelligence apparatus is monitoring everyone, turning 
"privacy" into a fond memory, like the horse-drawn carriage.

The military-political-corporate system needs an enemy. Establishment media 
needs someone to deflect from focusing on the bitter truths gripping a growing 
number of Americans. Today's sad story is visible to all who choose to see. 
It's a bleak truth: U.S. military engagements have repeatedly failed since 
WW-II; wages have stagnated since the 1970s; and citizen participation in 
elections has declined as the rich gained more financial control over the 
electoral process.

Those who challenge these - and others - developments risk a great deal both 
personally and professional. One should never forget the Rosenbergs' moral 
courage in the face a death. One can only wonder who among us would have the 
courage to resist such tyranny if faced with it today?

(source: David Rosen; counterpunch.org)