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John William Powell (July 3, 1919 – December 15, 2008) was a journalist and small business proprietor who edited the China Weekly Review, an English-language journal first published by his father, John B. Powell in Shanghai.
John W. Powell was tried for sedition in 1959 after publishing an article that reported on allegations made by Mainland Chinese officials that the United States and Japan were carrying out germ warfare in the Korean War. In 1956, the Eisenhower Administration's Department of Justice pressed sedition charges against Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julian Schuman, after federal prosecutors secured grand jury indictments against them for publishing allegations of bacteriological warfare. However, the prosecutors failed to get any convictions. The defendants invoked their Constitutional right to refuse to reveal self-incriminating evidence, and U.S. Department of Defense officials also refused to provide any incriminating archives or witnesses. This information was not revealed until decades later as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests.
All three of the defendants were acquitted of all charges over the next six years, after a Federal judge dismissed the core aspects of the case against them in 1959, due to obviously insufficient evidence against them.