Stalin proposed executing 50,000–100,000 German officers so that Germany could not plan another war. Roosevelt joked that “maybe 49,000 would be enough”. Churchill, however, was outraged and denounced “the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country”.
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You’d have to have due process for every single person with evidence.
We prosecuted US mafias and cartels en mass fairly recently. The Mafia Commission Trial prosecuted eleven leading organized crime figures at once. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal trial involved 35 defendants, simultaneously. The Chicago Seven trial originally involved eight defendants at once (reduced to seven when Bobby Seale’s case was declared a mistrial after the judge effectively tortured him in front of the jury).
That said, conspiracy trials only need to link the defendants within a chain of action. They don’t need individual trials for each defendant. “We can prove all these people were in the same organization together planning to do a crime” is sufficient to prosecute them as a unit.
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We prosecuted US mafias and cartels en mass fairly recently. The Mafia Commission Trial prosecuted eleven leading organized crime figures at once. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal trial involved 35 defendants, simultaneously. The Chicago Seven trial originally involved eight defendants at once (reduced to seven when Bobby Seale’s case was declared a mistrial after the judge effectively tortured him in front of the jury).
That said, conspiracy trials only need to link the defendants within a chain of action. They don’t need individual trials for each defendant. “We can prove all these people were in the same organization together planning to do a crime” is sufficient to prosecute them as a unit.