And Then There Were Three: Third Grand Jury Refuser Goes to Prison

[sabrina 1]

312. Are you saying that they have been jailed illegally? Show me the law which

made it possible to jail them for exercising their 5th Amendment rights?

Yes, let's start over. 'The law is the law'. What law? This is the cry of those who support this decision, which was made by a judge. You say there is no law. So the 'law is NOT the law'!

What law made it possible for a judge to jail these protesters? How about you, who unlike the rest of us, claim to be a legal expert, explain to us how a judge can remove someone's right to remain silent under the Constitutiona, and throw them in jail simply because he felt like it.

If there is no legal basis for his doing so, then they are indeed political prisoners, incarcerated by a rogue judge who had no law to base his decision on. That seems to be what your are now claiming.

And fyi:

Distressed by witnesses invoking this fundamental constitutional right of the fifth amendment, the government took steps to remove this obstruction. In 1954 Congress passed a special immunity law n88 ("the Act&quot , which applied only to matters of internal security. Upon a grant of transactional immunity n89 approved by the Attorney General, the Act compelled a witness to give testimony before a congressional committee or a grand jury. This was the first time that legislation provided for compulsory testimony in return for immunity in an area concerning political thought and activity. Prior to this Act, immunity legislation was used exclusively in the field of economic regulation. n90 Upon the passage of the 1954 Act, President Eisenhower announced that "[t]his Act provides a new means of breaking through the secrecy which is characteristic of traitors, spies and saboteurs." n91 The cold war, anti-communist hysteria period was coming to an end rapidly, however, and in the nine years after its passage, the Act was used only three times. n92 Nevertheless, the mechanism for the grand jury as a political inquisition and a tool of internment was in place. It took only the re-emergence of political dissent for the government to call the grand jury back into action.

Maybe you should have read the whole article ....