On this day in 1951 in a Manhattan courthouse, a jury found both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as well as their co-defendant Morten Sobell, guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage.
In Anne Sebba's excellent biography, "Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy," she details the final deliberations that brought the jury to their unanimous decision. A lone juror, an accountant and father of two, had held out on Ethel's guilty verdict on the grounds that it would be unconscionable to condemn a mother to her death, even though Judge Kaufman had advised jurors not to consider the punishment in their decision.
The foreman told him "Look, possibly this woman that you want to save will someday be part of a conspiracy to transmit secret information to a foreign power that would result in your own doom and the destruction of your wife and children." Confronted with this vague threat of harm, the juror acquiesced. On the morning of March 29, 1951, the foreman issued the guilty verdict.
Given the release of key information in the years since the guilty verdict, we now know the verdict was a grave miscarriage of justice. That is why last fall the RFC and the family of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg relaunched the Exonerate Ethel campaign, requesting a formal apology and acknowledgement of the government's wrongdoing. As we mark the 74th anniversary of the Rosenbergs' conviction, we re-share the excellent January 2025 article in The Nation by historian Phillip Deery on the irrefutable evidence in Ethel's defense and the case for her exoneration.