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''Abrams v. United States'', , was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the 1918 Amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a criminal offense to urge curtailment of production of the materials necessary to the war against Germany with intent to hinder the progress of the war. The 1918 Amendment is commonly referred to as if it were a separate Act, the Sedition Act of 1918. The defendants were convicted on the basis of two leaflets they printed and threw from windows of a building in New York City. One leaflet, signed "revolutionists", denounced the sending of American troops to Russia. The second leaflet, written in Yiddish, denounced the war and US efforts to impede the Russian Revolution. It advocated the cessation of the production of weapons to be used against Soviet Russia. The defendants were charged and convicted of inciting resistance to the war effort and urging curtailment of production of essential war material. They were sentenced to 10 and 20 years in prison. The Supreme Court ruled, 7–2, that the defendants' freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment, was not violated. Justice John Hessin Clarke in an opinion for the majority held that the defendants' intent to hinder war production could be inferred from their words, and that Congress had determined such expressions posed an imminent danger. Their conviction was accordingly warranted under the "clear-and-present-danger" standard, derived from the common law and announced in ''Schenck v. United States'' and companion cases earlier in 1919. Opinions for a unanimous Court in those cases were written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the ''Abrams'' case, however, Holmes dissented, rejecting the argument that the defendants' leaflets posed the "clear and present danger" that was true of the defendants in ''Schenck''. In a powerful dissenting opinion joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, he said that the ''Abrams'' defendants lacked the specific intent to interfere with the war against Germany, and that they posed no actual risk. He went on to say that even if their acts could be shown to pose a risk of damaging war production, the draconian sentences imposed showed that they were being prosecuted not for their speech, but for their beliefs. ==Background of the case== On August 12, 1918, Hyman Rosansky was arrested after throwing flyers out of a 4th floor window of a hat factory located near the corner of Houston and Crosby, in lower Manhattan, New York. 〔 Szajkowsky, Z. (1971) Double Jeopardy - The Abrams Case of 1919. ''The American Jewish Archives'' XXIII(1), 6-32.〕 Rosanky had received the flyers the night before while attending an anarchist meeting. Two different flyers were given to him, one in English, the other in Yiddish. The flyers were an acerbic protest against the Woodrow Wilson administration for interfering with the Russian Revolution in support of the Russian government. The flyers had been printed on or about June 15, 1918, in a basement rented by Jacobs Abrams located at 1582 Madison Avenue. With Rosansky's help, police arrested six other Russian Jews; Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky, Jacob Schwartz, Gabriel Prober and Samuel Lipman. All had emigrated to the United States from Russia.〔Polenberg, R. (1987), ''Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech''. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press(〕 The defendants were indicted for conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. Although trial had begun on October 10, 1918, actual trial proceedings were set to commence on October 15, 1918. On October 14th, Jacobs Schwartz died at Bellevue Hospital. The official cause of death was that he succumbed to the Spanish flu. Trial concluded on October 23, 1918, resulting in the following dispositions; (1) Gabriel Prober was acquitted, (2) Hyman Rosansky was convicted and sentenced to 3 years, (3) Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky and Samuel Lipman were convicted and sentenced to 20 years and a $1,000 fine, and (4) Mollie Steimer was convicted and sentenced to 15 years and a $5,000 fine. The defendants appealed their convictions to the United States Supreme Court. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Abrams v. United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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