Answer: Chief Justice John Marshall. The defendant was Aaron Burr — Jefferson’s estranged former vice president, who three years earlier had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel — accused of conspiring to split the western territories from the Union. Because justices then doubled as trial judges on their circuits, Marshall presided in Richmond, even as President Thomas Jefferson personally masterminded the prosecution, declared Burr’s guilt “beyond question,” and signed blank pardons to induce witnesses to testify. But the Constitution defines treason narrowly: levying war requires an “overt act” proven by two witnesses to the same act and Marshall’s evidentiary rulings on that point made conviction unlikely, and the jury acquitted on September 1, 1807. Marshall, Jefferson’s own second cousin and the author of Marbury v. Madison, also ruled that Burr could subpoena the president for documents, an early test of executive privilege. Read more here.
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