The lawyer contended that the benefit of publication outweighed the harm, since the Soviets already knew about the satellite. Morison’s lawyer portrayed him as a whistleblower, who let the Western world know about the Soviet carrier. spy satellite of the Soviets’ first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
#Pentagon papers trial
In 1985, a federal trial court applied White’s logic from the Pentagon Papers case and convicted Samuel Loring Morison, a government analyst, for espionage and theft, for providing Jane’s Defence Weekly with photographs taken by a U.S. But it did not restrict the government’s authority to prosecute future whistleblowers. Those “bizarre events,” as the judge called the incident, led to the end of Ellsberg’s case and helped propel the end of Nixon’s presidency. Their client might have been convicted and sentenced to prison if another secret had not become public - the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of embarrassing material at the behest of President Richard M. Nesson ’63, then a junior professor at HLS, now in his 55th year teaching at the school. At his trial in Los Angeles, Ellsberg was represented by Leonard Boudin, a renowned civil liberties lawyer who was a visiting lecturer at HLS, and Charles R. The Justice Department charged Daniel Ellsberg with espionage and theft for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the Times. The law review called White’s opinion “dicta amounting to admonition” - “a loaded gun pointed at newspapers and reporters who publish foreign policy and defense secrets.”Ī concurring opinion in the case drawing on the Espionage Act of 1917 has been called “a loaded gun pointed at newspapers and reporters who publish foreign policy and defense secrets.” White had read meaning into the law, suggesting that it might be a crime for a newspaper to publish information classified as secret - and suggesting that the paper could be punished for doing so. In 1973, two years after the Pentagon Papers decision, the Columbia Law Review published an exhaustive analysis of the Espionage Act, explaining the law’s “fundamental problem”: It is “in many respects incomprehensible.” In a concurring opinion in the case, Justice Byron R. That old law aimed mainly to curtail spying by punishing disclosure to foreign enemies of secrets about national security. The government based its case against the newspapers on the Espionage Act of 1917. The decision did nothing to protect future whistleblowers. When a government for itself supplants government for the people, the misrule of power displaces the rule of law: Autocracy takes over democracy.Ĭredit: AP Photo Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, was acquitted after a judge declared his case a mistrial. Except when publication would do grave and irreparable harm to the nation, the risk of damaging democracy by publishing information is preferable to the risk of undoing it by allowing the government to decide what citizens can know.
#Pentagon papers free
The ruling rests on the principle that free speech, embodied in a free press, is an essential element of American democracy. Kutler called “the people’s paladin against official wrongdoing.” The ruling legitimized the media’s status as what historian Stanley I. ’29, who was HLS dean from 1946 to ’67 until he joined the Justice Department. ’49, a Yale Law School professor and Solicitor General Erwin N. The advocates for the Times and for the government were eminent members of the Harvard Law School community: alumnus Alexander M. The Court allowed The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers to carry on publishing excerpts from the Papers’ 7,000 pages, revealing how the government used secrecy to deceive the American people about the nation’s disastrous role in the war. The ruling in the Pentagon Papers case legitimized the media’s status as what historian Stanley I. Black wrote 50 years ago in a concurring opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, so the press can “bare the secrets of government and inform the people.” In that historic ruling, the Supreme Court put an end to a temporary injunction against publication of the Defense Department’s secret history of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. The First Amendment shields the press, Justice Hugo L.
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