Twin solar/Nuke mega-thefts now being perpetrated in California—-with echoes in Ukraine and France—-pose a lethal threat to the human future.
This global-warmed package comes wrapped in billion-dollar hand-outs for California’s infamously criminal electric utility industry.
While bailing out deadly nukes it demands the death of the rooftop solar industry and rips off ratepayers and taxpayers.
Diablo Canyon’s twin coastal reactors are four brief hours—-as the radiation flies—-north of Los Angeles. Surrounded by active earthquake faults, the cracked, crumbling fission generators opened more than 35 years ago with critical materials long-since branded as unacceptable by regulators and experts.
Diablo Unit One has long since been rated among America’s most embrittled, a core cancer rendering it dangerously vulnerable to apocalyptic disaster. Nuclear Regulatory Commission resident site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned it could not withstand credible seismic shocks and should be shut. He is (surprise! surprise!!) no longer with the NRC.
In 2016 a consensus of state and local elected officials and regulators, union leaders, environmentalists, independent experts, consumer advocates and others agreed with Pacific Gas & Electric to shut Diablo in 2024-5. The orderly phase-out has proceeded, along with the planned phase-in of renewables to replace the power.
All has been profoundly successful.
But now California’s “liberal” Governor Gavin Newsom (who signed the 2016 deal) has rammed through the legislature an unclear extension for the two decrepit nukes. PG&E gets a $1.4 billion “forgivable” loan to keep them going despite escalating extreme danger.
The Biden Administration now wants to squander $1.1 billion federal dollars to help PG&E pay back the state.
California consumers are also expected to pay even if they use none of Diablo’s juice. The company is not required to upgrade vital safety, ecological or economic protections.
The rip-off has global impacts. Diablo’s Westinghouse designs date to the 1960s. They’re mirrored in France, where age and design flaws have shut more than half the 56-reactor fleet.
Neighboring Germany has profitably phased out 16 of its 19 reactors (the last three will close in April, 2023), replacing them with renewables. Pro-nuke France has chaotically shut twice as many at forced random, but still babbles about building more.
All fifteen of Ukraine’s reactors now face melt-down/explosions from unpredictable shelling and external power loss. Even as they shut, their spent rods demand constant cooling.
But Ukraine’s backup diesel generators have limited fuel. The central grid is under Russian attack. With far more radiation in the spent fuel pools than was in Chernobyl’s core (or was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Ukraine’s nukes pose a horrific threat to the global ecology that could far exceed the 1986 explosions that killed more than a million humans worldwide, or the 2011 Fukushima melt-downs that continue to irradiate the Pacific.
Thus the extended gamble at California’s rotted, quake-challenged reactors reverberates throughout the planet.
And it gets worse. Both California and Germany have been successfully phasing in massive arrays of solar panels, wind turbines, battery backups, increased efficiency and other proven green technologies to displace their dying nukes.
But Newsom now wants to slash pay-backs for the rooftop panels that have been facilitating Diablo’s shut-down. As a whole, those photovoltaic cells generate more power than the nukes.
Private array owners who feed excess power back to the grid get paid a fraction of what the utilities charge for the same juice. But California’s Investor Owned Utilities want to slash even that, crippling the green industry.
The only beneficiaries are solar-hating utilities like PG&E, which has been twice convicted of mass-killing felonies, and which also stands to profit from the public’s $1.4 billion to keep Diablo running.
Nuclear reactors burn at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, emit carbon and other greenhouse gases, daily kill billions of marine creatures and threaten us all with catastrophic explosions and radioactive fallout.
Their collective presence in war and earthquake zones, crumbling from age and incompetence, threaten the survival of our species.
Californians must save rooftop solar ( https://solarrights.org ) and stop the Diablo bailout
Germany’s successful and California’s interrupted phase-out plans have shown that the transition from fossil/nuke-based global suicide to sustainable Solartopian survival can be smoothly, cleanly, profitably managed.
The disasters in Ukraine and France—-as at Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl—-warn us that slowing that transition can only serve utility greed while spelling humankind’s doom.
Mass starvation killed millions in the Holodomor 90 years ago. Now Russia has again chosen the path of terror
Andriy Yermak is head of the Ukrainian presidential office
The Holodomor is one of the most terrifying words ever coined: no movie or book can convey its horrors. Have you ever tried to imagine mass starvation? Millions of slow, torturous, painful deaths. It’s difficult even to conceive of it – but it’s there in the historical record.
Picture it: people cling to life with all their dwindling might. They eat grass, leather boots, tree bark. They mix orach with pounded corn cobs. They grind millet husks with weeds, just to last a day longer. The foods are hardly chewable, and the human body cannot digest them, so people have constant stomach aches. They make the legs swell and the skin crack. Bodies lie in the streets. Some are missing flesh. Mothers lose their senses seeing their kids die.
Ukraine, for centuries the well-fed breadbasket of Europe, was transformed into hell 90 years ago. Having conquered our country – not for the first time – the Russians failed, once again, to subdue its people.
Between 1929 and 1932, a wave of peasant uprisings swept through Ukraine, then under Soviet rule – and the empire took revenge. It retaliated cruelly and cynically, taking food away from those who produced it. Years later, just as cruelly and cynically, the Soviet authorities sentenced the inhabitants of Leningrad to death by starvation. It’s true that the German-Finnish offensive and blockade took many lives, but the Soviet regime was no less guilty: the blockade did not prevent deliveries from Leningrad’s numerous military plants to the frontlines, but for some reason food supplies to the city were scarce.
Last weekend, Ukraine paused to mark the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor. Now, a new terror stalks our lands: the Kholodomor. Spelled with just one extra letter, this word means “death by freezing”. The words “hunger” and “cold” sound similar in Ukrainian, and the outcome is the same. Have you ever tried to imagine mass death from freezing? Millions of slow, torturous, painful deaths – no movie or book can convey these horrors, either, and we don’t even want to try to imagine them. But this is exactly the fate that the Russians are preparing for Ukraine today. For weeks now, with winter fast approaching, they have been peppering Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure with hundreds of missiles.
One extra letter makes no difference to the aim; the passing of 90 years make no difference. The essence is the same: genocide. The destruction of Ukraine, as an independent state, as a nation, as a free people. But again, the Kremlin’s attempts to swallow our state, piece by piece, as it did a century ago, are failing.
We repelled the attack on Kyiv. We pushed back the invaders from Kharkiv. We reclaimed Kherson. Now we see panicking Russian troops building fortifications in Crimea, rightly fearing that we will retake it, too. Donetsk and Luhansk will also return to Ukraine.
The aggressor state’s invasion was so pathetic that it has now chosen to follow the path of total terror. Turfed off the battlefields and fleeing from military combat, the Russian uniformed terrorists are now hitting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. The power grid is their primary target. A blatant war crime.
In the western media, we sometimes read that this Kremlin strategy is an attempt to force Ukraine to sue for peace. This analysis is not completely accurate. Putin does not just want Ukraine to capitulate – he wants us to beg for mercy. He needs more than just an end to the war. He wants a triumph that will humiliate Russia’s enemies – not just Ukraine, but our western allies, too. The threat of humanitarian disaster that those Russian missiles carry serves the same purpose as the Holodomor 90 years ago: to subdue Ukraine, to break its ability to resist.
The Russian authorities mistakenly believe that Ukrainians will take to the Maidan (oh yeah, we always take to the Maidan!) in protests demanding an end to the war. The Russian authorities have far too long comforted themselves with the “one people” myth – that Ukrainians are essentially Russians. They do not understand that Ukrainians are different. We take to the streets because of injustice and the desire for freedom. We do not take to the streets to call for a future lived under the yoke of oppression.
Ukraine’s annus horribilis has taken an even darker turn. We are one step away from massive blackouts as the freezing winter approaches. Our armed forces intercept most of Russia’s missiles, but there are so many of them – several dozen in each salvo – and those that do hit are enough to leave millions of people dark and cold. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.
But darkness will always be better than slavery. To stay free, we need further help from our friends and allies. Immediately. Now. Yesterday. We need reliable protection for our skies. We need resources to restore the power grids. We need generators to keep people warm while emergency workers repair broken infrastructure. In short, we need the light of hope.
To end Ukrainian civilisation, Russia believes that terminating the power supply might be enough. But they are wrong. Civilisation ends at the point where such evil is born. Civilisation is over for Russia.
Belmont Mass. Man Arrested On New Hampshire Wrongful Voting Charge
CONCORD, NH — A multi-year investigation led to a felony voter fraud charge on Friday against a businessman with homes in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Richard Rosen, 83, of Washington Street in Belmont, MA, and Route 175 in Holderness, NH, was arrested on a single felony count of wrongful voting, accused by investigators of voting in both states during the November 2016 general election.
Via the database, Rosen was flagged for having voted in both states during the 2016 general election, and an investigator began checking voting records to confirm.
During the initial eyeing of the data, the investigator “discovered a pattern of what appears to be double voting in both states dating back to 1996,” including general elections and primaries. Rosen was accused of voting in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts for the November 1996, November 2008, November 2012, and November 2016 presidential elections as well as the November 2010 and November 2014 midterm elections. He also appeared to have voted in the presidential primary in January 2012 in New Hampshire and the presidential primary in Massachusetts in March 2012. Rosen voted in the September 2018 primary in New Hampshire but not in Massachusetts.
In June 2020, the investigator called Rosen to question him about the multiple voting but he denied it, saying, “I do not vote in both (states) at the same time,” according to an affidavit. When questioned further, Rosen said he planned on voting in New Hampshire in 2020 but did not recall the exact times he had voted in the state. Rosen and the investigator agreed to meet a few days later to discuss his voting history.
Two hours after the phone call, the investigator received a call from the town clerk of Holderness, who accused Rosen of requesting to have his name removed from the checklist.
The investigator met with Rosen on June 8, 2020, and he again denied voting in both states at the same time and explained he voted in each state, wherever he was living most of that particular year, an affidavit stated.
Blaming ID Fraud
During the interview with the investigator, Rosen was also accused of claiming his identity was stolen by a former business partner in the mid-1990s who stole $100,000 from him.
Rosen stated he discovered the theft “a couple of years ago” after discovering charges in Madrid, Spain, at a hotel, the report stated.
But the investigator questioned this, accusing Rosen of using different names while talking about the supposed ID thief, giving different possible addresses for the man and phone numbers, too. The affidavit said he did not report the crimes to any authority. Rosen suggested the investigator check out his driver’s license, saying it would be a picture of the ID thief.
In July 2020, Rosen said he realized he had voted in New Hampshire because he had an absentee ballot and recalled voting in the state until 2018, an affidavit said. The investigator claimed he denied voting in Belmont between 2004 and 2018, saying he restarted voting in Massachusetts after he began spending more time closer to his doctors.
Rosen said he was “proud” to have voted in New Hampshire since he spent most of this time here and did not dispute seven other elections between 2008 and 2016 when he cast ballots in the state, the report said.
The investigator discovered the ID thief had died in 2011. He asked Rosen why he would say he was in contact with him “a couple of years ago” when he had been dead for nine.
“Rosen stated he thought it was several years ago that he last saw (the man) and that he cannot recall now,” the report said.
The license also had a photo that appeared to be Rosen from decades ago. Rosen said it was from April 2000, the report said, something confirmed by the NH DMV.
Rosen was also asked to further explain why he would vote by absentee ballot in New Hampshire and in person in Belmont in November 2016, but the affidavit said he had no recollection of doing so. The investigators said both Rosen and his wife had checked in with election officials and then checked out after voting, the process in Belmont. Rosen said he may have accompanied her but denied voting, the report said.
The investigator also spoke with Rosen’s wife, who confirmed he voted in federal and presential elections from Holderness and town elections in Belmont, the report said. When asked about both of them being checked into the Belmont polling location in November 2016, “(she) paused, then stated that she was getting a call from her doctor and that she would have to call me back,” something she never did, the investigator wrote.
A Second Man Blamed
In late July 2020, a private investigator hired by Rosen submitted a report where a Cambridge man admitted to voting in Rosen’s name “three or four times,” the report said.
The investigator spoke with the man in December 2020. During the conversation, he said he admitted to a family member that he had voted for Rosen, the report said. When asked for information about the family member, the man said he had not spoken to her and had no phone number for her since she moved to Arlington, MA.
The investigator, however, tracked the woman down in Billerica, MA, in January 2021, and she said she had never heard of Rosen and denied her family member ever admitted voting in Rosen’s name.
An elections official in Cambridge, MA, also sent the investigator the man’s voting history.
The man registered in October 2011 and had voted once — in the municipal election in November 2011.
The report said that the man also voted once in Malden, MA, in November 2003.
The investigator continued to speak with the man, attempting to find out what was going on, and during those conversations, he was unable to provide any details about voting under Rosen’s name. He also denied Rosen contacted him about voting in his name. The report said the man claimed he learned about the entire issue from Rosen’s butler.
The man “initially agreed to appear at an investigative grand jury in Grafton County” but then refused once a date was secured, the report said.
A warrant was filed later against Rosen and he was arrested on Friday.
The businessman faces three and a half to seven years in prison and a fine of up to $2,000 if convicted. He will also lose any chance of ever voting in New Hampshire again. Rosen is slated to be arraigned in Merrimack County Superior Court in Concord, NH, on Dec. 21.
Rosen’s voter registration affiliation was unavailable at post time due to the Belmont town clerk’s office closing at noon.
AMassachusetts man has been arrested and charged for allegedly submitting a false voter registration to illegally vote in a 2021 New Hampshire town election, officials said Wednesday.
Scott Kudrick, 50, of Norwell, was charged with one felony count and three misdemeanor counts related to wrongful voting, according to a statement from New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella.
Kudrick allegedly submitted a registration form containing false information to be eligible to vote in Conway, N.H., the statement said. On the form, he stated he lived in Conway, when he actually lived in Norwell.
Kudrick voted in the April 13, 2021 Conway town election when he was not qualified to vote, the statement said.
Kudrick has two scheduled arraignments — one on September 15 and one on October 4, Michael Garrity, a spokesman for the AG’s office, said in an e-mail.
CONCORD – The businessman who is building a commercial greenhouse complex in Berlin has been charged with voting twice in the Nov. 8, 2016, general election.
Richard Rosen, 83, of Belmont, Mass., and Holderness, N.H., has been indicted on one felony count of wrongful voting related to voting twice in that election, a class B felony, according to a news release from Attorney General John Formella.
Rosen is the CEO of American Ag Energy, and its subsidiary North Country Growers LLC, has been working since 2017 to get the high-tech greenhouse project off the ground.
“Mr. Rosen knowingly checked in at the checklist at the Belmont, Mass., polling place and cast a Massachusetts ballot after having already cast an absentee ballot in the same election in Holderness, N.H.,” Formella said.
Class B felony charges carry a penalty range of 3½ to seven years in prison and a fine of up $2,000. Additionally, pursuant to the New Hampshire Constitution, anyone convicted of a willful violation of the state’s election laws will lose the right to vote in this state. Rosen is scheduled to be arraigned Dec. 21.
This case is being prosecuted Deputy General Counsel Myles Matteson and Attorney Matt Conley of the Election Law Unit. The investigation was conducted by Chief Investigator Richard Tracy.
Attempts to reach Rosen Friday were unsuccessful. Rosen is well-known in the North Country for his work in getting the project going.
Berlin Mayor Paul Grenier said Friday he was unaware of the voting charge against Rosen.
Grenier said construction site work on the property has been done and construction begun on the property the company purchased from the city.
Rosen has said the two 10-acre greenhouses will produce 8 million pounds of tomatoes and 15 million heads of lettuce yearly and create 80 jobs.
A man was arrested for wrongful voting in New Hampshire on Friday after a warrant for his arrest was issued earlier this week.
The New Hampshire Attorney General's Office announced that Derek Castonguay of Manchester, New Hampshire, turned himself into authorities on charges of wrongful voting and unsworn falsification. He is accused of making a false material statement regarding his qualifications to vote in Salem.
Castonguay allegedly represented his address to be 11 Alfred Drive in Salem, during the State General Elections on November 4, 2014, which he knew to be false.
Castonguay was also charged with unsworn falsification because he allegedly presented a driver's license bearing a false address.
Both charges are class A misdemeanors, carrying a maximum penalty of $2,000 fine and 12 months in jail.
Castonguay is scheduled to be arraigned on December 14, 2015 at the 10th Circuit Court in Salem, New Hampshire.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A man has been accused of submitting voter forms containing false information during the New Hampshire presidential primary.
Ole Oisin, 46, of Hopkinton, was arrested Tuesday on two misdemeanor counts of wrongful voting, the attorney general’s office said.
One alleges that Oisin submitted a voter registration form for the Feb. 11 primary, saying he was born in “Senegal, Nation of Islam” and that he was born in 1984. Also, he didn’t provide information that he was a naturalized citizen. Oisin was born in Ireland, the office said.
The second charge alleges that Oisin submitted an affidavit that didn’t provide his actual domicile address, that he was born in 2001, and that his place of birth was Senegal.
Oisin is scheduled for an arraignment on Jan. 12, 2021.
Also, Vincent Marzello, 65, of West Lebanon, was indicted on one count of wrongful voting for allegedly voting twice during the Nov. 8, 2016, general election, once under a different name. He was arrested in September.
He’s scheduled for arraignment Dec. 14.
Phone numbers couldn’t be found for Oisin or Marzello, and it wasn’t immediately known if they had lawyers.
On paper, the two-party system that has governed this nation since the mid-to-late 19th century remains intact.
In local, state, and federal elections, candidates square off — Democrats with the (D) next to their names and Republicans with the (R). We speak of red states and blue states, donkeys and elephants. We look back in history at a run of presidents from one party or another and who controls Congress. We tend to place the present into an ongoing narrative.
But it is an illusion — the momentum from the past still driving the train forward even though we are off the tracks. In the Republican embrace of Donald Trump, a large segment of the party has morphed into a cult of personality. Its leader has sought to subvert the democratic process rather than win fairly or lose responsibly, much less gracefully.
Many Republican politicians understand that this is weakening their electoral standing. Looking at the results in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is sobering — many races Republicans should have, or at least could have, won were lost. This is but the most recent manifestation of a process that has been going on for a while.
Much of the institutional power of the Republican Party relies on the peculiarities of our system of government. Only one Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote since 1988 — George W. Bush in 2004. But thanks to the Electoral College, Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, Republican candidates won the presidency (and the power to appoint Supreme Court justices) despite receiving fewer votes nationwide than their opponent. And Trump wasn’t that far off from doing it again in 2020 — a few votes shifting in a few battleground states could have given him the win, even though he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million. When you throw in partisan gerrymandering and how Senate representation is allocated, Republicans are often able to accrue power in Washington without being the more popular party.
Perhaps due in part to their systematic advantages, the Republicans have pursued an electoral approach that focuses more on exploiting the mechanics of elections than advocating for policy.
The foundational premise of our system is that political parties compete for votes according to policy and preference. There is an understanding that in some areas of the country, for social, historical, or other reasons, one party might be strong and another weak. These allegiances can shift over time, and often have.
But what we are seeing now is something different. And it begins with a fundamental question: For what does the current Republican Party stand? Tax cuts for the wealthy and the interests of big business are a given. But what else? We are not talking about the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan or John McCain, or even Barry Goldwater. One could love or abhor what the Republican Party in those eras stood for, but you could at least come up with a cogent set of policies.
In 2016, Republicans won both houses of Congress and the presidency. What legislation of significance did they pass? When Democrats had unified control after 2008, they passed the Affordable Care Act. The flurry of legislation of the Congress that is ending now is historic, especially when one considers Democrats had only 50 senators.
To note all this is not to say that the Democrats have all the answers or that their policies are perfect, or even anything approaching that. It is to say that they are acting like a typical political party, albeit one with a broad and sometimes fractious coalition. The Republicans are not.
This is a dangerous road we are traveling. It might not be popular to say with some, but we need a strong Republican Party, or something else to rise from its ashes.
Politics is predicated on the fact that not everyone is going to agree with each other on how we should run our government. That can be framed as a weakness, but it is more accurately a strength. We benefit from a competition for ideas. We benefit from having to persuade people that some ideas have more merit. We benefit from coalitions and consensus building.
None of that describes the modern Republican Party, or at least its actions on the national level. And America is far weaker because of it.
One gets the sense that many Republicans are among the most frustrated by what has transpired. Some, like Liz Cheney, have denounced those who peddle authoritarianism under the banner of a party she once helped lead. Many others have left the party entirely.
There are Republican politicians who are trying to chart a path of greater honesty and dedication to American ideals. They are mostly found at the state level, especially in blue and purple states where they have no choice but to work with Democrats. We also can find some kernels of hope in the recent Congress, where there have been a surprising number of bipartisan bills.
As we look at the incoming House of Representatives and a Senate with Mitch McConnell still as minority leader, however, the prospect of a Republican Party as a partner in governance seems like a pipe dream. This is not sustainable, for the Republican Party or the nation.
Sometime in the future, Americans may adopt some other completely different political system. But for the present, let us see clearly that a healthy policy- and values-driven two-party system is what our country needs just now. Not to have it is a danger.
On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
—
Notes:
J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason Against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal Vol. 101: Iss. 2, Article 3.
