The First Amendment, Censorship and Civil Liberty Activity in America Essay Example
The U.S. constitution, 1st amendment guarantees the citizens the freedom of expression and free speech. The amendment safeguards the people’s right to receive, seek and impart ideas and information of any type. These rights to expression and speech acts as the basis of the vibrant democracy on which all other rights are built such as the voting right. However, freedoms of expression and speech are not absolute in the U.S. and thus the constitution provides some limitations to these freedoms such as in cases of defamation, state censorship and obscenity (Cohen, 2009). This essay addresses a sample case ruling involving the rights to free speech and expression, and the controversies that were involved.
Bradley Manning, a U.S. army general is charged with violations of freedom of press and expression where he had been accused of leaking important information about
...the military to WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. He was accused of leaking out more than 700 classified military videos and information about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and Guantánamo Bay (Huetteman, 2013). Though the U.S. constitution protects these imminent rights, the law also provides such limitations such as when the country’s security is under jeopardy. Bradley, was accused of treason and exposure of security secret information to public domain. He pleaded guilty of the charges raveled against him by the court martial and was sentenced to 35 years in jail in 2013. However, to him, he was paying the price of establishing a free society. His sentence was the harshest in American history receiving criticism from civil liberty and freedom campaigners (Huetteman, 2013).
To me, I agree that, Bradley had violated the freedoms to speech and expression
However, sentencing him for 35 years in jail was too harsh. He was punished more than the soldiers who killed and tortured prisoners. The legal system needed to consider that, the information he had shared was also good for the interest of the public and thus should have given him a lesser charge.
References
- Cohen, H. (2009). Freedom of Speech and Press: Exceptions to the First Amendment (1st ed.). Retrieved from https://iuristebi.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/freedom-of- speech-and-press.pdf
- Huetteman, C. (2013). Manning Sentenced to 35 Years for a Pivotal Leak of U.S. Files. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 17 November 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/manning-sentenced-for- leaking- government-secrets.html
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