Sedition

[cheddarsnax]

Are there any sedition laws currently in effect in the US?

[cheddarsnax]

If not, when was the last sedition law enacted?

[BobT]

“Seditious conspiracy” is a crime under U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2384.

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place
subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to
overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the
United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force
the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the
execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize,
take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the
authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

I don’t know when it was passed.

Sedition in the military can get you a trip to the firing squad also.

[peepthis]

From this site:

The nation’s most recent sedition law was adopted in 1940. The Smith Act, as it is known, prohibits the advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. Following a series of trials and two Supreme Court rulings in the 1950s, the law has become a relatively benign prohibition. The high court ruled in 1957 in Yates v. U.S. that to sustain a conviction under the Smith Act, the government must prove that the defendants advocate specific violent or forcible action toward the overthrow of the government. The government found it impossible to prove this in the 1950s, and the Smith Act has not been invoked to punish an act of expression for more than 40 years. The Supreme Court made its last important attempt to reconcile the First Amendment and the law of sedition in 1969 when it ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that advocacy of unlawful conduct is protected by the Constitution unless it is directed toward inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

There were of course sedition laws in effect during and after World War I as well, which were tempered by the mid-1920s with the establishment of a “clear and present danger” standard for speech.

[peepthis]

Dagummit, forgot to include the link. Scroll down to the header “The Meaning of Freedom” and you’ll find a cogent three paragraph synopsis of sedition laws, from 1798 up til the 1940 Smith Act.

[Kalashnikov]

IANAL, but I think http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/ is a good place to look up US laws.

Here’s the whole chapter:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/htm_hl?DB=uscode&STEMMER=en&WORDS=sedit+&COLOUR=Red&STYLE=s&URL=/uscode/18/pIch115.html#muscat_highlighter_first_match

and for those subject to the Uniform code of Military Justice:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/htm_hl?DB=uscode&STEMMER=en&WORDS=sedit+&COLOUR=Red&STYLE=s&URL=/uscode/10/894.html#muscat_highlighter_first_match

[psychonaut]

The Smith Act was infamously applied at the culmination of the Communist witch-hunt in the 1940s. Virtually the entire leadership of the Communist Party was convicted of sedition, and they received long prison sentences and hefty fines. The Act was invoked to deprive the Communist Party of legitimacy in the eyes of American voters; prior to the trials, it and other far-leftist parties had memberships in the hundreds of thousands. Ironically, the Communist Party had been one of the most outspoken advocates of the Smith Act prosecution of Trotskyist organizations some ten years earlier. What goes around comes around, I suppose.

[ElwoodCuse]

Hehe, these are still on the books? I thought it was amusing that to take a government job in Pennsylvania I had to sign this piece of paper that said I would not advocate the overthrow of the government or associate with those who do.

[psychonaut]

The “Are you or have you every been…” question is still routinely asked of immigrants by the INS, according to this article from the Seattle Times.