Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to be executed during peacetime. Other convicted co-conspirators were sentenced to prison, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working at Los Alamos Laboratory, was convicted in the United Kingdom. For decades, many people, including the Rosenbergs' sons, have maintained that Ethel was innocent of spying and have sought an exoneration on her behalf from multiple U.S. presidents.
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law enacted on June 15, 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18 : 18 U.S.C. ch. 37.
A hung jury, also called a deadlocked jury, is a judicial jury that cannot agree upon a verdict after extended deliberation and is unable to reach the required unanimity or supermajority. A hung jury may result in the case being tried again.
Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919), was a United States Supreme Court decision, relevant for US labor law and constitutional law, that upheld the Espionage Act of 1917.
The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was a 6 title Act of Congress dealing with a wide range of issues, including not only industrial espionage, but the insanity defense, matters regarding the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, requirements for presentence investigation reports, and the United States Sentencing Commission reports regarding encryption or scrambling technology, and other technical and minor amendments.
The Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal involved Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, passing classified documents regarding United States policy towards Iran to Israel. Franklin pleaded guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison, which was later reduced to ten months' house arrest. Franklin passed information to American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy director Steven Rosen and AIPAC senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman, who were fired by AIPAC. They were then indicted for illegally conspiring to gather and disclose classified national security information to Israel. However, prosecutors later dropped all charges against them without any plea bargain.
Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192 (1991), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court reversed the conviction of John L. Cheek, a tax protester, for willful failure to file tax returns and tax evasion, who was convicted again during retrial. The Court held that an actual good-faith belief that one is not violating the tax law, based on a misunderstanding caused by the complexity of the tax law, negates willfulness, even if that belief is irrational or unreasonable. The Court also ruled that an actual belief that the tax law is invalid or unconstitutional is not a good faith belief based on a misunderstanding caused by the complexity of the tax law, and is not a defense.
Noshir Sheriarji Gowadia is a former design engineer and convicted spy for several countries. He was arrested in 2005 and later convicted on industrial espionage-related federal charges.
The Classified Information Procedures Act or CIPA is codified as the third appendix to Title 18 of the U.S. Code, the title concerning crimes and criminal procedures. The U.S. Code citation is 18 U.S.C. App. III. Sections 1-16.
Thomas Andrews Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.
Tax protesters in the United States advance a number of administrative arguments asserting that the assessment and collection of the federal income tax violates regulations enacted by responsible agencies –primarily the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)– tasked with carrying out the statutes enacted by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President. Such arguments generally include claims that the administrative agency fails to create a duty to pay taxes, or that its operation conflicts with some other law, or that the agency is not authorized by statute to assess or collect income taxes, to seize assets to satisfy tax claims, or to penalize persons who fail to file a return or pay the tax.
United States v. Kilbride, 584 F.3d 1240 is a case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejecting an appeal from two individuals convicted of violating the Can Spam Act and United States obscenity law. The defendants were appealing convictions on 8 counts from the District Court of Arizona for distributing pornographic spam via email. The second count which the defendants were found guilty of involved the falsification of the "From" field of email headers, which is illegal to do multiple times in commercial settings under 18 USC § 1037(a)(3). The case is particularly notable because of the majority opinion on obscenity, in which Judge Fletcher writes an argument endorsing the use of a national community obscenity standard for the internet.
Stephen Jin-Woo Kim is a former State Department contractor who pleaded guilty to a felony count of disclosing classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen. Prosecutors charged that Kim's actions indirectly alerted North Korea to what U.S. intelligence officials "knew or did not know about its military capabilities and preparedness."
United States v. Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman was an early 21st century court case from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The government prosecuted one Department of Defense employee (Franklin) and two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for allegedly disclosing national defense information to persons "not entitled" to have it, a crime under the Espionage Act of 1917. It is one of the few Espionage Act cases of its kind, targeted not at traditional espionage or sedition, but at the practice of information leaking in Washington DC. The cases against Rosen and Weissman were also unusual because this aspect of the Espionage act had rarely been used against non-government individuals. Franklin pleaded guilty, but all charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped.
The Defense Secrets Act of 1911 was one of the first laws in the United States specifically criminalizing the disclosure of government secrets. It was based in part on the British Official Secrets Act of 1889 and criminalized obtaining or delivering "information respecting the national defense, to which he is not lawfully entitled". Much of the language of the 1911 law was re-used in the Espionage Act of 1917, still in force.
Irvin Chambers Scarbeck was a US State Department official who was convicted of giving information to Polish UB during the Cold War after he became involved in a romantic affair with a Polish woman and was blackmailed by Polish intelligence agents. His case was the first prosecution under Title 50 783(b) of the Subversive Activities Control Act. His case also prompted a modification of the Espionage Act of 1917 to allow it to be used outside U.S. territory.
McFadden v. United States, 576 U.S. 186 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that section 841 of the Controlled Substances Act requires the government to prove that to be in criminal violation, a defendant must be aware that an analogue defined by the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act with which he was dealing was a controlled substance.
United States v. Haymond, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), is a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for certain sex offenses committed by federal supervised releases under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(k) as unconstitutional unless the charges are proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined Gorsuch's plurality opinion, while Breyer provided the necessary fifth vote with his narrow concurrence that began by saying he agreed with much of Justice Alito's dissent, which was joined by Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Kavanaugh.
Itaru Tachibana was a Japanese spy active in the United States.
Ruan v. United States, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.
