The jury of a two-day mock trial organized in New York by the American Bar Association found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg not guilty of plotting to supply U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, a charge for which the pair was convicted in 1951 and executed in 1953.

The trial used a real set of lawyers, judge and jury, but the Rosenbergs were played by actors who, in their roles, emphatically denied committing espionage or even of belonging to the Communist Party. The real Rosenbergs took the Fifth Amendment on those questions. One juror said her own decision to acquit the pair was based on emotional testimony from the actress who played Ethel Rosenberg. When asked whether she was a spy, the actress insisted: "Absolutely not, on my oath. I am a mother, not a spy." The real Ethel Rosenberg gave no such testimony, and she was convicted in part because her own brother, David Greenglass—a machinist at the bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico—testified that the Rosenbergs recruited him to provide sketches of the bomb.

ABA organizers pointed out that the event not only served as a recreation of the famous 1951 trial, it showed what might have happened if the couple had been tried under today's legal standards. Some testimony allowed in 1951 was barred during the two-day mock trial because of changes in constitutional standards. For example, prosecutors now could not point out that Ethel Rosenberg pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than tell a federal grand jury whether she had ever met admitted spy courier Harry Gold.

[Ed.: Enough, already! Even Alan Dershowitz believes the Rosenbergs were guilty of committing espionage!]

†