In its per curiam opinion, a 6-3 majority said the First Amendment protected the newspapers from an injunction seeking to stop the Pentagon Papers’ publication. Attorney General John Mitchell cited Section 793(e) of the Espionage Act as giving the president the power to halt their publication. The act’s last major test at the Supreme Court came in 1971, when the federal government attempted to prevent the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing classified documents about the Vietnam War in the Pentagon Papers Case.

The Espionage Act then received some revisions in 19. “An American citizen has the right to discuss these matters either by temperate reasoning or by immoderate and vicious invective without running afoul of the Espionage Act of 1917,” wrote Justice Frank Murphy. The Court said he could not be prosecuted under the act. United States settled a free speech issue after a man sent literature to people in military service that criticized President Franklin D. But in 1944, a divided Supreme Court in Hartzel v. Since Gorin, many Espionage Act cases have focused on leaks of government information to the public and the press. Reed believed the act’s definition of “National Defense” was vague, but it still applied to the case because there was 'intent or reason to believe that the information to be obtained to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Reed’s ruling also raised some doubts about the Espionage Act. The Supreme Court upheld the men’s convictions, but Justice Stanley F. Both men contested their convictions under the Espionage Act based on the act’s definition of “national defense.” Gorin was a Soviet spy who received stolen information about Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals from a disgruntled civilian Naval Intelligence employee. The Espionage Act still survived in a peacetime form and saw another challenge at the Supreme Court in January 1941 when a unanimous court decided Gorin v. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Holmes argued.īy March 1921, Congress had repealed the Sedition Act amendments to the Espionage Act. But Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissent introduced the concept of the free marketplace of ideas, which later gained prominence in the Court’s free speech cases. United States, majority of Justices upheld the criminal conviction of immigrants who publicly opposed the United States’ intervention in Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. Other challenges to the original act soon failed. United States, when it ruled that the First Amendment did not protect pacifists who circulated antidraft literature from arrest under the act. In 1919, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act in Schenck v. The act was at the heart of several landmark Supreme Court cases in the years just after World War I. The Sedition Act amendments made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States.” The controversy over the Espionage Act of 1917 also led to the creation of the Civil Liberties Bureau (the predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union). The Sedition Act of 1918 also harkened back to the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 during John Adams’ presidency, which today are seen as in conflict with the Constitution’s First Amendment. Amendments to it in May 1918, were known as the Sedition Act. The Espionage Act of 1917 was an outgrowth of the federal government’s efforts during World War I to contain not only espionage but also public criticism of its war efforts. Section 793 deals with the “gathering, transmitting, or losing of national defense information.” The warrant did not specify which of Section 793’s subsections applied in this case. Section 793 is one of six sections within the Espionage Act of 1917, as amended. § 793 as one of three reasons for the property search. One of the federal government’s most powerful laws is also known as one of its most controversial statutes: the Espionage Act.Ĭurrently, the Espionage Act is back in the news after the Justice Department listed the act in a warrant to obtain documents from former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida.

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