The Nation - News from June 10, 1988

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the imprisonment of former U.S. intelligence analyst Samuel Loring Morison, convicted of espionage and theft. The court, by a 6-3 vote, denied Morison’s emergency request to remain free pending a formal appeal of his conviction. Morison, grandson of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, was convicted in October, 1985, of giving to Jane’s Defense Weekly photographs taken by a U.S. spy satellite of a Soviet nuclear aircraft carrier under construction. He was sentenced to two years in prison. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in April, rejecting Morison’s arguments that Congress intended laws against spying to protect against the distribution of classified material to a foreign government rather than leaks to the press.