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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jay the Obscure: [QB] Of interest: [QUOTE]Conspiracy, "Mere Membership," and Freedom of Association The danger of criminalizing "mere membership" in a disfavored group is that it is essentially allows guilt by association, a concept anathema to American principles of justice. Not only does this approach offend due process, which requires individual guilt, it infringes upon freedom of association, a constitutionally-protected right. But past experience demonstrates that the more threatening the group, the more likely it is that the line between mere membership and participation in an illegal conspiracy will be blurred. The Nuremberg Precedent The Nuremberg Charter specifically criminalized six organizations, including the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo. The underlying idea was that membership alone would make a defendant vulnerable to punishment. Indeed, allied planners intended to rely on organizational charges to prosecute large numbers of people in the trials subsequent to the main Nuremberg prosecutions, people against whom there was no individualized evidence but plenty of documentary evidence showing membership. (For various reasons, including developments in the political context, this did not happen.) The Nuremberg judges, and even its prosecutors, were aware of the due process concerns implicated in criminalizing membership. In the end, the tribunal's actual practice was much more conservative than the Charter would suggest, including a narrower interpretation of organizational liability. (Some later courts read the Nuremberg precedent as requiring personal knowledge and active participation as predicates for organizational guilt.) No Nuremberg defendant was convicted simply on the basis of organizational membership. Justice Robert H. Jackson, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, acknowledged that the Charter's rules on organizational liability "would be easy to abuse," although on his return to the U.S. he supported the punishment of alleged communists on the basis of organizational liability. Telford Taylor, one of Jackson's deputy prosecutors, learned a clearer lesson. On his return home, he developed a specialty of defending individuals accused of Communist Party membership.[/QUOTE]From FindLaw's [URL=http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20020429.html]Writ: Commentary[/URL] section. And what I found to be an interesting quote: [QUOTE]He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. -Thomas Paine [/QUOTE] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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