De facto Commander-in-Chief Franklin Roosevelt, Esq., issues Proclamation 2561, creating military tribunals to hear the cases of eight German saboteurs charged with espionage against the United states.  The accused agents are to be denied the due process guarantees under the Constitution for the united States.  Whereas the current statute provides for a thirty-year maximum sentence for espionage, Roosevelt authorizes the death sentence with a two-thirds concurrence of the jury.  He also allows the courts to write their own rules, and exempts their verdicts from judicial review (appeal to a higher court). “I won’t give them up. … I won’t hand them over to any United [s]tates marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus.  Understand?”

        NOTES:

• This is an ex post facto, imperious edict, in that it increases the penalties for an act after it has been performed.  If it is not illegal, prior to the enactment, how could it be an offense?  The offense is a creation of the forbidden ex post facto statute, thus unlawful.  These powers are limited, even to CONgress, which has the sole power to legislate, by Article I, Section 9 [Clauses 2 and 3].  The Supreme Court, in Ex parte Milligan, (1866), decided that military tribunals may not be held in areas in which Article III courts are functioning.