I wrote the following in the epilogue to my book, An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey, in late 2002:
I was scheduled to give a plenary address at the annual meeting of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in Raleigh, North Carolina at the end of October [2001]. Over the summer the meeting’s organizers had asked me to provide attendees with historic perspective and introduce them to another kind of capital case. The abolition movement has been exclusively focused on murder cases and many of its militants did not even realize someone in this country could be executed for conspiracy, as my parents had been.
I realized that my parents’ case was no longer merely of historic or educational interest. Since the mass murderers who flew the planes into the towers were all dead, the government was likely to develop conspiracy cases against their colleagues and ask for the death penalty. My parents’ case was the only capital conspiracy in our country’s history since the civil war. I realized Americans might soon face an unprecedented wave of capital conspiracy cases and that these cases would present anti-capital punishment forces with a major new challenge.
For several years this prediction seemed like a false alarm. But six and a half years later those chickens are coming home to roost. The Bush Administration recently announced that six “top terrorists” held at Guantanamo Bay will face the death penalty if convicted of terrorist conspiracy charges.
In some ways, the case of my birth parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is very different from those facing trial before Military Commissions at Guantanamo. My parents were secular Jewish Communists. Their political perspective was totally unlike that of the Islamic fundamentalists at Guantanamo. But the broader psycho-social context displays many similarities.
In my parents’ case, federal prosecutors, at the height of the McCarthy period, linked the people the public feared the most (Communists) to the thing the public feared the most (the atomic-bomb) while the Korean War was raging. In the Guantanamo Six cases, the current administration has linked the people the public now fears the most (Islamic Terrorists) to the thing the public fears the most (weapons of mass destruction) during the never-ending “war on terror.”
In my parents’ case the trial judge secretly talked with prosecutors, and FBI agents coached chief prosecution witnesses to invent testimony. This was justified because at a time of unprecedented international crisis, national security trumped the constitutional protections provided for criminal defendants. The same national security rationale validates stacking the deck against the defendants during the Military Commissions trials. Even evidence gained through the use of torture (euphemistically termed “coercion”) may be used to obtain a conviction.
In my parents’ case the trial judge justified sentencing my parents to death after they had only been convicted of conspiracy by stating that their crime was “worse than murder,” and that, among other things, they caused upwards of 50,000 casualties in the Korean War. Today administration officials apply similar hyperbole to justify death sentences against the “worst of the worst.” The administration is, in effect, saying these people are so bad that it is OK to torture and kill them. In sum, the same forces that made it impossible for my parents to receive a fair hearing in 1951 present a daunting challenge for anyone attempting to preserve the rights of the Guantanamo defendants today.
The attacks on September 11, 2001 were horrific human rights abuses. They were, in short, crimes against humanity. That makes it imperative to bring these mass murderers to justice and to scrupulously protect their human rights in the process. We must not become human rights abusers in the name of protecting human rights. This will merely perpetuate the cycle of violence. If the Guantanamo Six are guilty, the public must be protected, but we must engage in that protection without violating the most fundamental human right of all, the right to life (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). These rights become meaningless without universal application. We mock them when we only apply them to those we like.
The anti-death penalty movement cannot remain silent because these are hard cases with particularly unsympathetic defendants. Let's all publicly reassert our universal opposition to capital punishment, these defendants included, and ask others in the anti-death penalty movement in United States and around the world to join us.
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