Movie: The Conspirator (And the NDAA and WOT)
Saw Robert Redford's movie The Conspirator about the trial of one of the (many) charged conspirators in the assassination of Lincoln—Mary Surratt. It's all history, but unless you know the whole story going in there are twists and turns so consider this a SPOILER warning.
The film is artistically kind of blah, in line with Redford's other somewhat preachy message movies, but it is very much on-point relative to the War on Terror and recommended on that basis. A good watch.
The crux of the movie is the propriety of military justice for civilians. The Civil War was over, but not over... the last of the Confederate generals didn't surrender for some time. (One rogue confederate ship hunted commercial vessels for years, IIRC.)
Some undefined group of people who were indisputably motivated by the interests of the Confederacy (as they saw them) attemtpted to decapitate the US government (and military) by the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, VP Johnson and Sec State Seward.
Are citizens charged with that sort of thing in a time of war within the jurisdiction of the Military or Civil Courts?
The conspirators were tried by a military tribunal--no jury of their peers. They were not afforded any of the usual Constitutional protections. Some were guilty. Some perhaps not. But either way, the process was designed to convict and execute all who were charged as fast as possible.
The most interesting part of the story (spoiler) is that after Mary Surratt was convicted by the militray tribunal her lawyer (a Union war hero and subsequently the first city editor of the Washington Post) found a judge willing to favor a writ of Habeas Corpus and demand that Surratt be turned over the civil authorities for a real civil trial. President Andrew Johnson vacated that writ, and she was hung.
One year later the Supreme Court ruled that civilians are always entitled to a public civil trial. Mary Surrat's son (who was almost surely guilty of enough to hang him, if not the speciffic assassination as carried out) received a civil trial and, unlike his less clearly guilty mother, was aquitted and went free. All because she was tried right away while he managed to hide out long enough for the supreme court, in its glacial majesty, to weigh in on the question.
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