GREAT CRIMES AND TRIALS: The Rosenbergs

On 19th June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg walked to the electric chair in Sing Sing prison to become the first married couple in the United States to be executed together.

They had been found guilty, at the height of the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts, of spying for the Soviet Union during the Second World War and passing vital secrets of the Manhattan Project, America's atomic bomb programme, to the Russians.

To the end they protested their innocence and controversy continues as to whether they were condemned simply to calm the American public's fear of growing communist power.