A U.S District judge ordered the release of secret grand jury testimony in the atomic spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled Tuesday that testimony taken in 1950 and 1952 should be released, The Associated Press reported. The witnesses who gave the testimony are still alive but have not consented to the release or could not be located.
The Rosenbergs, who were convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, were executed in 1953. It has been proven that Julius Rosenberg was a spy, but there has been considerable debate over the conviction of Ethel Rosenberg.
“Each generation has defined its own answer,” Hellerstein said in his ruling. “And each generation needs to explore the history of the past to understand fully the context in which these polar extremes come into clashes with one another.
“So the history of how we dealt with these problems in the 1940s and 1950s is a current history, and a history that is very important for us to understand.”
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