SEDITION

A revolt or an incitement to revolt against established authority, usually in the form oftreasonordefamationagainst government.

Sedition is the crime of revolting or inciting revolt against government. However, because of the broad protection of free speech under the first amendment, prosecutions for sedition are rare. Nevertheless, sedition remains a crime in the United States under 18 U.S.C.A. § 2384 (2000), a federal statute that punishes seditious conspiracy, and 18 U.S.C.A. § 2385 (2000), which outlaws advocating the overthrow of the federal government by force. Generally, a person may be punished for sedition only when he or she makes statements that create a clear and present danger to rights that the government may lawfully protect (schenck v. united states, 249 U.S. 47, 39 S. Ct. 247, 63 L. Ed. 470 [1919]).

The crime of seditious conspiracy is committed when two or more persons in any state or U.S. territory conspire to levy war against the U.S. government. A person commits the crime of advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government when she willfully advocates or teaches the overthrow of the government by force, publishes material that advocates the overthrow of the government by force, or organizes persons to overthrow the government by force. A person found guilty of seditious conspiracy or advocating the overthrow of the government may be fined and sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. States also maintain laws that punish similar advocacy and conspiracy against the state government.

Governments have made sedition illegal since time immemorial. The precise acts that constitute sedition have varied. In the United States, Congress in the late eighteenth century believed that government should be protected from "false, scandalous and malicious" criticisms. Toward this end, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which authorized the criminal prosecution of persons who wrote or spoke falsehoods about the government, Congress, the president, or the vice president. The act was to expire with the term of President john adams.

The Sedition Act failed miserably. thomas jefferson opposed the act, and after he was narrowly elected president in 1800, public opposition to the act grew. The act expired in 1801, but not before it was used by President Adams to prosecute numerous public supporters of Jefferson, his challenger in the presidential election of 1800. One writer, Matthew Lyon, a congressman from Vermont, was found guilty of seditious libel for stating, in part, that he would not be the "humble advocate" of the Adams administration when he saw "every consideration of the public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice" (Lyon's Case, 15 F. Cas. 1183 [D. Vermont 1798] [No. 8646]). Vermont voters reelected Lyon while he was in jail. Jefferson, after winning the election and assuming office, pardoned all persons convicted under the act.

In the 1820s and 1830s, as the movement to abolish slavery grew in size and force in the South, Southern states began to enact seditious libel laws. Most of these laws were used to prosecute persons critical of slavery, and they were abolished after the Civil War. The federal government was no less defensive; Congress enacted seditious conspiracy laws before the Civil War aimed at persons advocating secession from the United States. These laws were the precursors to the present-day federal seditious conspiracy statutes.

In the late nineteenth century, Congress and the states began to enact new limits on speech, most notably statutes prohibiting obscenity. At the outset of world war i, Congress passed legislation designed to suppress antiwar speech. The espionage act of 1917 (ch. 30, tit. 1, § 3, 40 Stat. 219), as amended by ch. 75, § 1, 40 Stat 553, put a number of pacifists into prison. Socialist leader eugene v. debs was convicted for making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio (Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211, 39 S. Ct. 252, 63 L. Ed. 566 [1919]). Charles T. Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were convicted for circulating to military recruits a leaflet that advocated opposition to the draft and suggested that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude (Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 39 S. Ct. 247, 63 L. Ed. 470 [1919]).

The U.S. Supreme Court did little to protect the right to criticize the government until after 1927. That year, Justice louis d. brandeis wrote an influential concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 47 S. Ct. 641, 71 L. Ed. 1095 (1927), that was to guide First Amendment jurisprudence for years to come. In Whitney the High Court upheld the convictions of political activists for violation of federal anti-syndicalism laws, or laws that prohibit the teaching of crime. In his concurring opinion, Brandeis maintained that even if a person advocates violation of the law, "it is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on." Beginning in the 1930s, the Court became more protective of political free speech rights.

The High Court has protected the speech of racial supremacists and separatists, labor organizers, advocates of racial integration, and opponents of the draft for the vietnam war. However, it has refused to declare unconstitutional all sedition statutes and prosecutions. In 1940, to silence radicals and quell Nazi or communist subversion during the burgeoning Second World War, Congress enacted the smith act (18 U.S.C.A. §§ 2385, 2387), which outlawed sedition and seditious conspiracy. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the act in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S. Ct. 857, 95 L. Ed. 1137 (1951).

Sedition prosecutions are extremely rare, but they do occur. Shortly after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, the federal government prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric living in New Jersey, and nine codefendants on charges of seditious conspiracy. Rahman and the other defendants were convicted of violating the seditious conspiracy statute by engaging in an extensive plot to wage a war of terrorism against the United States. With the exception of Rahman, they all were arrested while mixing explosives in a garage in Queens, New York, on June 24, 1993.

The defendants committed no overt acts of war, but all were found to have taken substantial steps toward carrying out a plot to levy war against the United States. The government did not have sufficient evidence that Rahman par ticipated in the actual plotting against the government or any other activities to prepare for terrorism. He was instead prosecuted for pro viding religious encouragement to his cocon spirators. Rahman argued that he only performed the function of a cleric and advised followers about the rules of Islam. He and the others were convicted, and on January 17, 1996, Rahman was sentenced to life imprisonment by Judge Michael Mukasey.

Following the september 11th attacks of 2001, the federal government feared that terrorist networks were very real threats, and that if left unchecked, would lead to further insurrection. As a result, Congress enacted the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-56, 115 Stat. 272. Among other things, the act increases the president's authority to seize the property of individuals and organizations that the president determines have planned, authorized, aided, or engaged in hostilities or attacks against the United States.

The events of September 11 also led to the conviction of at least one American. In 2001, U.S. officials captured John Philip Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who had trained with terrorist organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lindh, who became known as the "American Taliban," was indicted on ten counts, including conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals. In October 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

further readings

Cohan, John Alan. 2003. "Seditious Conspiracy, the Smith Act, and Prosecution for Religious Speech Advocating the Violent Overthrow of Government." St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary 17 (winter-spring).

Curtis, Michael Kent. 1995. "Critics of 'Free Speech' and the Uses of the Past." Constitutional Commentary 12 (spring).

——. 1995. "The Curious History of Attempts to Suppress Antislavery Speech, Press, and Petition in 1835–37." Northwestern University Law Review 89 (spring).

Downey, Michael P. 1998. "The Jeffersonian Myth in Supreme Court Sedition Jurisprudence." Washington University Law Quarterly 76 (summer).

Gibson, Michael T. 1986. "The Supreme Court and Freedom of Expression from 1791 to 1917." Fordham Law Review 55 (December).

Grinstein, Joseph. 1996. "Jihad and the Constitution: The First Amendment Implications of Combating Religiously Motivated Terrorism." Yale Law Journal 105 (March).

Levinson, Nan. 2003. Outspoken: Free Speech Stories. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Weintraub, Leonard. 1987. "Crime of the Century: Use of the Mail Fraud Statute Against Authors." Boston University Law Review 67 (May).

cross-references

Cold War; Communism; Freedom of Speech; Socialism.

Sedition. Also known as seditious libel, this crime initially covered any “dangerous words” threatening the authority of the state, the sanctity of its laws, or the reputation of its officers. Under the interpretation of seditious libel that emerged during the seventeenth century, judges determined the “law of the case” (whether a statement or publication was seditious), permitted juries to determine only the “facts of the case” (whether the defendant has expressed the words), and disallowed evidence of truth as a defense.

During the eighteenth century, an alternative interpretation emerged. The guarantees of freedom of speech and press, critics insisted, required that juries determine the seditious nature of political statements, and that truth constitute a defense. The Federalist party incorporated these ideas, which had emerged in the 1735 Zenger trial, into the Sedition Act of 1798. Jeffersonians tried under this law, however, found it useless to argue either the nonseditious quality of their words or their truth to Federalist judges and juries. Although some Jeffersonian lawyers argued that the First Amendment barred any federal prosecution for sedition, the Sedition Act expired in 1801 without a Supreme Court ruling on its validity.

Attempts to suppress dissent, especially during wartime, revived debates over the issue of sedition in the twentieth century. The 1918 Sedition Law restricted criticism of U.S. participation in World War I. The Smith Act (1940), passed on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, made it a crime to advocate or teach the desirability of violently overthrowing the government. The Supreme Court upheld these laws' constitutionality but divided over how they should be applied. The more libertarian justices, building on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), insisted that the government could criminalize political speech only if it posed a “clear and present danger” of “substantive” harm to the state. This position, suggesting that speech could not be criminalized solely on the basis of its allegedly dangerous content, remained contested, however, especially when the Court heard cases involving Communist party members during the 1950s.

Important rulings during the next decade, however, translated the libertarian position into constitutional doctrine. In two 1964 political libel cases (New York Times v. Sullivan and Garrison v. Louisiana ), the Court ruled that the Sedition Act of 1798 had violated the First Amendment's “core meaning”—“a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open.” In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court held that only words intended to incite or produce “imminent lawless action” could, in light of the First Amendment, be the object of criminal sanctions. These decisions effectively denied the legitimacy of prosecuting “dangerous” political discourse, the core notion in the old crime of sedition.
See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Anticommunism; Bill of Rights; Censorship.

Bibliography

Harry Kalven Jr. , A Worthy Tradition: Free Speech in America, 1988.
Norman L. Rosenberg , Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel, 1990.

Norman L. Rosenberg

sedition , in law, acts or words tending to upset the authority of a government. The scope of the offense was broad in early common law, which even permitted prosecution for a remark insulting to the king. Although there have been several statutes in the United States forbidding seditious utterances and writings, the protection guaranteed to speech and press by the First Amendment to the Constitution has made them difficult to enforce except during periods of great national stress. The Sedition Act of 1798 generated so much opposition (see Alien and Sedition Acts ) that similar statutes were not enacted until the 20th cent. During World War I the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) punished speeches and writings that interfered with the war effort or caused contempt for the government. Vaguely worded and broadly interpreted, they resulted in over 2,000 prosecutions, mostly against radicals and the radical press. The Smith Act of 1940, restricted in scope to the advocacy of violence against the government, was invoked only infrequently during World War II, though it was later used successfully to prosecute Communist party leaders, as in Dennis v. United States (1951). The libel decision of Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), by granting special protection to criticism of public officials, largely eliminated what remained of the crime of sedition in the United States.

sedition †violent party strife XIV; †revolt, mutiny XVI; behaviour inciting to rebellion XIX. — (O)F. sédition or L. sēditiō, -ōn-, f. sēd- SE- + itiō going, f. it-, pp. stem of īre go.
So seditious XV. — (O)F. or L.

se·di·tion / siˈdishən/ • n. conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.

sedition n.conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.

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