Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, R.I.P.

Roger Roots's essay at LRC shows how the American "Justice" system didn't work out perfectly for the Rosenbergs. Ethel might have been completely innocent. The evidence incriminating her was perjured - in the trial, witnesses against her said that she typed up notes on goings-on in Los Alamos, but at the grand jury hearing one of the witnesses admitted to typing up those notes herself. Had the transcripts for the grand jury hearing been openly available, the testimony against Ethel would have been noticed as bad testimony. But alas, jury transcripts are secret because we have to respect "jury secrecy", which - believe it or not - used to exist to protect the jury against undue influence from the prosecutors. We weren't able to learn all of the truth until the transcripts were released just now, more than 50 years after the trial (and, needless to say, too late to save the Rosenbergs).

Now, even if Ethel did write up those notes, and even if the information Julius conveyed to the Russians actually were designs for the A-bomb, the trial and execution still seems completely unjust. I don't believe in capital punishment, but even if it is justifiable to kill murderers confined after the act, what are we left with? A right to kill people who murdered in the past. If no one was murdered, there is no murder to punish, and an execution is totally uncalled for.

How many Americans died from a Soviet nuclear attack? Zero. So how many Americans did the Rosenbergs murder by conveying information on the A-bomb to the Soviets? Zero.

There is a phrase that used to be quite important in the American legal system, which roughly means "Show me the body."* Now it is hard to show a cadavre that's been nuked, but obviously no one here got nuked. Had our courts had a diligent interpretation of that phrase "show me the body", the Rosenbergs might not have been executed for a crime that resulted in no one's death.
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*Actually, the "body" referred to in the phrase habeas corpus is the living body of the petitioning prisoner, not the dead body of the victim. I'm just being poetic here.