Traitor Receives 15 Years

By admin • April 22, 2008

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GREENBELT, Md. — A federal judge in Greenbelt has sentenced a man to 15 years in federal prison for sending threatening letters to President Bush, a judge and a prosecutor in Montgomery County, and a Rockville attorney who uncovered the man’s alleged embezzlement scheme more than 20 years ago.

U.S. District Judge Roger Titus handed down the sentence Monday for 52-year-old Scott Rendelman. The sentence was increased from less than 12 years after Titus learned Rendelman had sent threatening letters to two federal judges since his conviction in December.

Rendelman said the letters were his crusade against a justice system which he said allowed him to be raped and beaten in prison.

The death threats sent to the Montgomery County judge and prosecutor followed Rendelman’s 2005 extortion conviction.

Legally, treason involves more significant actions than mere letters. However, since Rendelman’s letters also implicate the president of the United States, it’s treason. And treason, as Wikipedia will tell us, was traditionally punished thusly:

Murder is now generally considered the worst of crimes, but in the past, treason was thought of as worse. In English law high treason was punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered (men) or burnt at the stake (women), the only crime which attracted those penalties (until the Treason Act 1814). The penalty was used by later monarchs against people who could reasonably be called traitors, although most modern jurists would call it excessive. Many of them would now just be considered dissidents.

In Shakespeare’s play King Lear (c. 1600), when the King learns that his daughter Regan has publicly dishonoured him, he says They could not, would not do ‘t; ’tis worse than murder: a conventional attitude at that time. In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circles of Hell are reserved for traitors;Judas, who betrayed Jesus in Christian theology, suffers the worst torments of all. His treachery is in fact so notorious that his name has long been synonymous with traitor, a fate he shares with Benedict Arnold, Brutus, and Quisling.