The Flimsy Case Against Mary Surratt

[mikegriffith1]

(01-10-2019 10:31 PM)wpbinzel Wrote:  The opening sentence of your "article" reads "On June 30, 1865, an illegal military tribunal found Mrs. Mary Surratt guilty of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth...."

Um, Mike, please provide the legal citation of the court case that specifically found the conviction of Mrs. Surratt before a military tribunal to be "illegal." If you cannot provide such a ruling from a court of competent jurisdiction, then your statements are, and should be labeled as, your personal opinion and not as a fact. That seems to be a concept with which you have a very high degree of difficulty.

I say this half-jokingly, but I swear it seems like you folks just beamed into our day from July 1865. The Supreme Court ruled in 1866, in Ex Parte Milligan, that it was unconstitutional to try civilians in a military court if civilian courts were in operation.

It is just amazing that anyone in our day would defend the government's decision to try the accused Booth conspirators in a military court, after all that has been written on the subject since then.

Stanton knew that it was unlikely that any civilian court would convict Mudd, Surratt, O'Laughlen, Spangler, and Arnold based on the pathetic "evidence" he had against them.

Even two of the original members of the military commission privately expressed misgivings about the legality of the commission, and so they were dismissed. Lincoln's former attorney general blasted the decision to try the accused before a military commission.

Stanton's only excuse for pushing for a military trial was his bogus Confederate conspiracy theory, which was destroyed even at the conspiracy trial, and has been so thoroughly debunked since then that even most scholars in our day now reject it.