![]() ![]() CONSPIRE DEFINE FREEand his hostile rhetoric was protected free speech. Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” argued on appeal that he was never involved in planning actual attacks against the U.S. An Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, and nine followers were convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy and other charges in a plot to blow up the United Nations, the FBI’s building, and two tunnels and a bridge linking New York and New Jersey. Seditious conspiracy law was last successfully used in the 1990s in the prosecution of Islamic militants who plotted to bomb New York City landmarks. Oscar Lopez Rivera, a former leader of a Puerto Rican independence group that orchestrated a bombing campaign that left dozens of people dead or maimed in the 1970s and 1980s, spent 35 years in prison for seditious conspiracy before President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017. ![]() They and more than a dozen others who assisted in the attack were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Four pro-independence Puerto Rican activists rushed the building and opened fire on the House floor, wounding several representatives. Three members of the militia pleaded guilty to weapons charges.Īmong the last successful convictions for seditious conspiracy charges were in another, now largely forgotten storming of the Capitol building in 1954. But a judge ordered acquittals on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial, saying prosecutors relied too much on hateful diatribes protected by the First Amendment and didn’t, as required, prove the accused ever had detailed plans for a rebellion. prosecutors brought such a case was in 2010 in an alleged Michigan plot by members of the Hutaree militia to incite an uprising against the government. Here are some notable treason and sedition cases from years past: ![]() Days before the attack, one defendant suggested in a text message getting a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to their “waiting arms,” prosecutors say. Though authorities have said the Oath Keepers and their associates worked as if they were going to war, discussing weapons and training. enemies “aid and comfort.” No one has been charged with treason in the Jan. An attorney for Rhodes called the charges “unusual” and “unfortunate.”Īlong those lines there’s also treason - which is to levy war against the U.S. He did not enter the Capitol building that day, but is accused of helping to put the violence into motion. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder and leader, is the highest-ranking member of an extremist group arrested so far. 6 case, it lends gravity to the accusations of violence and terror that day, and rebuts, in part, claims by some Republicans that the riot wasn’t as serious because no one had yet been charged with sedition. Overzealousness in applying them going back centuries has also discredited their use. Seditious conspiracy, though, is legally complex and there’s a historical difficulty in securing convictions, and legal scholars say prosecutors are sometimes reluctant to file the charges. Plenty of people have been charged and convicted of conspiracy, and there currently are two major conspiracy cases in the Jan. It’s different from a conspiracy charge, alone where two or more people work together to commit a crime. The last such case was filed in 2010 against members of a Michigan militia, but two years later they were acquitted by a judge who said their hateful diatribes didn’t prove they ever had detailed plans for a rebellion. Still, prosecutors filed seditious conspiracy charges Thursday against the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and 10 suspected associates one of just a few in the nation’s history. ![]()
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