User:Savidan/United States v. Burr
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United States v. Burr was a federal criminal proceeding, from April to October 1807, against former Vice President Aaron Burr and others, on charges of treason and violations of the Neutrality Act of 1794, for their role in the Burr conspiracy. Burr was indicted and tried in the circuit court for the District of Virginia (C.C.D. Va.) before Chief Justice John Marshall and District Judge Cyrus Griffin.
The trial was a "celebrated legal contest which, with but little intermission, lasted for six months, and in which the ability, learning, ingenuity, and eloquence of counsel equalled any ever displayed in this, or possibly any other, country."[1] Specifically, the nine day argument over the meaning of the Treason Clause of Article Three was "doubtless the richest display of legal knowledge and ability of which the history of the American bar can boast."[2] According to Yoo, "[i]f the O.J. Simpson trial was the trial of this century, then the Aaron Burr case was the trial of the last."[3]
The report of the case, in twelve parts, occupies 207 octavo pages in the Federal Cases (F. Cas.). (That report is based on the notes of lawyer David Robinson.)[4] The case remains an important consitutional precedent applying the Treason Clause, the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment, and executive privilege under Article Two.