On Doing Time (Includes CD-ROM)

During his eighteen-plus years in prison, five of which were spent at U.S.P. Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay, Morton Sobell learned well the price of "doing time."

In 1951, during the dark days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. Sobell was sentenced to thirty years in prison. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death and were later executed. The trial remains one of America's most controversial.

This is the story of what led up to the trial, to the conduct of the trial--including an account of justice subverted to political ends--and of one man's odyssey through Depression-era radicalism and the hard world of the United States prison system.

It is also the story of an intelligent man determined not to be broken, determined to achieve vindication.

As part of that effort, after he was released, the author obtained hundreds of previously classified FBI documents that graphically demonstrate the goverment's motives and methods during the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, and beyond. The most relevant of these documents are included on a CD (which comes with the book), giving the reader a rare opportunity to compare the author's original suppositions and his adversary's documentation of its strategy.

Morton Sobell received his degree in engineering from City College of New York in 1938 and held jobs with the Navy Department and General Electric prior to his arrest in 1950. After spending a little more than 18 years in prison, he was released and returned to New York City in 1969. Shortly thereafter, he relocated to San Francisco, where he now lives with his wife Nancy.