Psycho Justice
Bethell, Tom
Q 0 ~ o m I 0 ~ 0 6 0 B 0 D I D B I o I O 0 O ~ b I D ~ o ~ t B I Q I D I i 6 6 0 0 n D w t O 0 o 0 0 0 0 D 0 b m ~ 0 0 t ~ U I D O I 0 Q t I D D ~ 6 o n I O j I ~ 0 0 o t D j 6 0 . . . . U ~ O I ~...
...There are many Halleck stories in Washington, but the following, told to me by a local lawyer, will suffice...
...Supreme Court in the judicial hierarchy, is by far the most radical judge on the federal bench...
...Psychological testing" had persuaded her that "his reading level is sixth grade," his mathematics only second grade, and (a real Catch-X2 here) Holmes' "entire experience had been in the juvenile system, which did not acquaint him with the consequences of criminal behavior...
...First, his name appears to be unpronounceable (in truth, it is simply BADGE-e0...
...The desirability of jailing murder suspects is not so obvious as it might look at first glance," the paper editorially intoned a few days later...
...Thus the career of Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) is unique in the annals of the working press...
...Genius--eccentric, painstaking--may sell papers...
...In another case Halleck was told that he had to give a defendant a sentence, because probationary supervision was required, whereupon he replied: "Probation for five minutes...
...The air and atmosphere, so to speak, which are around a man," he wrote at 29, "have a delicate and expressive power, and " The Collected FP'orks of F~ralter Bdgebot, in twelve volumes (eight now complete), The Economist, publisher...
...vols...
...V-VIII, $63.75...
...Does that satisfy you...
...Genius, more to the point, has better things to do than try...
...Holmes was 19 when he committed the murders...
...But what happened next really did give me a jolt...
...What strikes me as being so appalling about this case, when looked at from the point of view of plain decency and common sense, rather than from the point of view of those who are pleased to call themselves civil libertarians, is that the judge seems to construe her role not as meting out justice to criminals but as meting out retribution to society...
...I picked up a big brick and I started to beat him with it...
...For nearly a decade now, the Economist, together with Norman St...
...But the Washington Post, at least, was not particularly upset about the incident...
...One day I went to see Judge Halleck, so startling were the reports about him in the papers...
...It surely doesn't get them out...
...A few months ago Halleck intercepted a witness paper the prosecution wanted to serve on the court reporter...
...John-Stevas, Bagehot's biographer, has been compiling and publishing the great man's collected works...
...In a recent law review article Bazelon went out of his way to attack "the system," leading MacKinnon to respond that he seemed to be suffering from some "unspecified social grievance," leading to his "freeing guilty defendants on non-legal grounds...
...The New York Times, in reporting the news, could say no more of the Economist's greatest editor than that he "was widely considered to have been one of the more distinguished economic journalists...
...David Bazelon, who is one step below the U.S...
...I followed the case with a certain degree of fellow-feeling for the young man...
...It turned out to be a piece of lunacy passed in 1966 called the Bail Reform Act...
...I & lI, t23.00...
...She regarded Holmes as "immature and impulsive," with "sex identification problems and drug abuse problems...
...The specific gives rise to the general...
...Yet there is nothing mummified about these sturdy, blue volumes...
...Then he darted off to his chambers and came back with a copy of Alice in rVonderland, copiously underlined, from which he began to read while nervous aides plucked at his robe...
...The result, beyond belief, is reversal for a failure to investigate a fabricated defense...
...Not long after I arrived in Washington, D.C., about 18 months ago, I walked home at about eleven one evening, having refused the offer of a ride thoughtfully offered by my host, and I came across the corpus delicti of a recent crime: a body on the sidewalk covered by a sheet, police cars, whirling ambulance lights...
...III& IV, $23.00...
...I imagine the judge must have said something like: "We'll see you back here in February...
...This lawyer had a case before Judge Halleck, he recalled, but the defendant did not show up for trial...
...Take the case of D.C...
...As he was leaving the courtroom Halleck turned to the assistant U.S...
...In a lecture on "Literature" to the Langport Literary and Scientific Institution, Bagehot advised his audience to read the Times every day, news and advertisements, if they would know what the world was really about...
...His essays, in their genial range, are really conversation...
...sensible, solid men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid, supine instinct, without originality and without folly...
...But I am sorry to report that the Criminal-is-the-Victim view of justice still seems to hold sway with a number of judges in the nation's capital, some of whom appear to have missed their true vocations as social workers or psychiatrists when they were elevated to the bench...
...vols...
...Halleck told the court official to take it back to the prosecutor and "shove it up his a...
...A concluding four volumes, three of economics, one of letters and miscellany, are expected late this year...
...Then he commits far worse crimes...
...He kept this up for a few years...
...Four more of political studies followed in 1974...
...A variation on the Bazelon theme has been played out in the D.C...
...Defense lawyers were sometimes harangued, too, and even other judges...
...In brief, the armed robbery conviction of Willie Decoster was reversed by Bazelon and Wright because his court-appointed attorney did not do a good enough job of exploring all defense avenues open to him...
...When James Wilson, his father-in-law and founder of the Economist, died in 1860, Bagehot took over the magazine...
...In his dissent Judge MacKinnon commented on this: "Thus Decoster at sentencing did not claim to be innocent and in effect admitted his guilt...
...So the young man is released...
...President Ford renominated Halleck in 1975, but throughout the following year the Senate failed to confirm the _9 See.Joseph C. Goulden, The Benehwarmers, Weybright & Tally, 1974...
...I must say that the Holmes case did alert me, but to the need for judges who do not harbor an animus against society...
...When they are not forthcoming, the murderer is then defined as one of society' s many victims...
...bore tomorrow...
...The project began with four volumes of literary and fiistorical essays (including sketches of William Cowper, Hardey Coleridge, and Lord Macaulay), which appeared in 1968...
...And it was likely to be," he adds: "humour gains much by constant suppression...
...For Bagehot, alike banker, essayist, and advisor to governments, was indeed a genius...
...Bagehot possessed both the journalist's facility and the journalist's spleen...
...Bagehot had been a banker...
...By not sticking to the point, Bagehot both makes the point and goes beyond it...
...DIQQ0DDD0OD6QtOi0DIQQQ6Dm000lgQmIIOD000DDDDDDI0D0IQIQOBBBj00DDI0~0Do0Q0D09DDD~i0000QoI00QIPQOD060BQ QQ000BQQDDPBDDD0mQ000ig0QO0DQ0DDmiDQQ00Q0U0DDPB0Q, James Grant Genius on Deadline Banker, editor, essayist, Walter Bagehot joined the world with the world of letters...
...He divorced his first wife and married a probation worker, grew a beard and moderately long hair and became, in the eyes of some, as pro-defendant as he once had been pro-prosecution...
...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 First of all, a defendant is brought into court, and the judge concludes (as happened in this case) that he is "mentally ill," "immature, hostile and anxious...
...Nor were they then to Bagehot...
...She refused to admit the confession into evidence, and said she would deny its admissibility into any trial, because it was "the product of a culmination of unlawful and coercive police activity...
...He concluded: "It is unthinkable for this court to require counsel at the outset of a criminal trial to investigate every possible defense that might be fabricated...
...His words won't sit still on the page...
...Decoster, do you have something you want to say on your behalf...
...I lost my temper...
...Following that, I began to accept rides home...
...This added no further encouragement...
...In the view of a number of local prosecuting and defense lawyers this was one of the most outrageous judicial decisions of recent years...
...How's that...
...So Holmes, who drags young innocents into the woods and beats their brains out, is in turn whisked from a bus stop and very properly interrogated by police, as a result of which society in turn is to be penalized by the denial Of Holmes' confession...
...The English Constitution (politics), Lombard Street (finance), and Physics and Polities (sociology, but of the very best cut) stand as the still-read testi3nony to Bagehot's versatility, his genius to join the world with the world of letters...
...Yes, and Henry Aaron, it is said, could hit for power...
...The conventional wisdom more and more tended to conceive of crime as an inevitable (and deserved) reaction to the pricks and goads of society, which manifest themselves in such forms as racism, corporate greed, institutional authority, inadequate educational facilities, harsh toilet training, and premature weaning...
...auto theft, be released from custody so that he could go and live with his family in Maryland...
...The same may be said of a recent and quite remarkable opinion handed down by the U.S...
...Decoster had the misfortune to be caught in the act of the armed robbery in question--caught by two plainclothes police officers who were driving by in a patrol car...
...Holmes said he did it because "something came over me...
...Yet Bagehot chose the trade of journalism...
...8 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...
...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia: the Willie Decoster decision, filed in October and upheld by Chief Judge David L. Bazelon and Appeals Judge J. Skelly Wright, with Appeals Judge George E. MacKinnon dissenting...
...In short, he went batty, to judge from his recent behavior...
...the reduetio ad absurdum of defense strategies: do a feeble job, lose the case, and get the defendant to appeal on the grounds that he was poorly defended...
...Second, it is forever linked with the English Constitution, an institution as mysterious and uninviting as the Electoral College...
...Genius is as rare in journalism as it is in plumbing...
...Superior Court Judge Sylvia Bacon...
...It explains the problems we have here better than anything...
...D.C...
...I feel like I can--well, I know I can be rehabilitated which I have did [sic] on my part in having to come to face the facts...
...It turned out that Dockery had a prior conviction for possession of marijuana, that he had failed to show up in court once before, and that he had previously been arrested and charged with armed robbery, all unbeknownst to the judge...
...Bagehot illuminates Gibbon by talking of the life around Gibbon, of the value of desultory reading, the fantasy of history, the timelesspropensity of stupid money to find its suitable reward,_ the English militia, the English middle class: "Everywhere there exists the comfortable mass: quiet, sagacious, shor~-sighted--such as the Jews whom Rabskakeh tempted by their wine and their fig tree, such as the English with their snug dining room and after-dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal...
...Let me briefly review the technique employed by Judge Bacon, because it is quite common among judges today...
...He loved the clamor of the world...
...Then he hit her with a "white concrete brick, a big chunk, it was white and had blood on it...
...What was this "law...
...Next day I read in the papers that the victim, who also had only recently arrived in the capital, and like me had been walking home alone, had been stabbed to death by an unknown assailant...
...Both callings serve the needs of the hour: news and running water wait for no one...
...He knew about men...
...The project has an improbable, ghoulish air about it...
...Do you want the job...
...Nevertheless, the young man, by now diagnosed as "anxious," is deemed to be in need of "treatment," not punishment, and the judge proceeds to discern that no appropriate treatment is readily at hand...
...The first and most important point [the editorial continued] is that Judge Newman and the prosecutor were both following the law, literally and explicitly...
...I started to strangle him...
...During a recess he came out of the courtroom into the reception room where I was sitting...
...I stacked paper all over his head and I burned it...
...Journalism is properly mortal, doomed by its own immediacy: inform today, James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly...
...Decoster's two partners-in-crime changed their pleas to guilty in mid-trial when these two officers testified against them...
...Bagehot, as someone said, has endured two misfortunes...
...Finally he allowed himself to be dragged back into court, handing me the classic as he left...
...At that time, as may be recalled, Original Sin was thought to have disappeared from the face of the earth, along with other superstitions...
...It is unlikely that he will still be a judge by the time Jimmy Carter is sworn in...
...The press cries out for copy, stupidly, daily, for no better reason than habit...
...His institutional behavior was greatly improved," Judge Bacon later noted, and "it appeared that there were no further programs for him in the District of Columbia...
...He was swiftly convicted, after a two-day trial...
...In his confession Holmes said he dragged the boy off to some woods and "burned" him...
...After Dockery was arraigned and charged with first-degree murder, and his case set for trial a few months later, thejudge let the man back out on the street again...
...He begins an article on Edward Gibbon: "A wit [almost certainly Bagehot himself] said of Gibbon's autobiography that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire...
...I think they were red socks, like knee socks...
...What startled my lawyer friend was that Halleck simply "acquitted" the man without trial...
...In short, the law has been stood on its head by the social worker judge...
...Upon his release, Holmes murdered an 11-year-old child, Peggy Schroeder, for which he was convicted, and after his conviction he confessed to having murdered two other children at about the same time--Stanford Kendricks, 9, and Joanie Bradley, 12...
...page 251...
...The evidence for these conclusions derives in large measure from the crimes that have been committed, of course...
...Read it yourself," he said...
...courts later threw out this rule as unworkable, and ever since, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, Bazelon has devoted himself to finding ever more outlandish ways of reversing the convictions of criminal defendants...
...When this confession surfaced at a pretrial hearing, Judge Bacon immediately got on the case...
...Poor Halleck seems ultimately to have been duped by the fiberated philosophy of his own "lifestyle...
...This, of course, opens the door to...
...Every case that comes back to me from the Grand Jury is going to be given the full treatment," he said, adding ominously: "then I will release every one of them on personal bond so they can go out and yoke and rob and cut people up, and you can explain that to the general public...
...he had twice run for Parliament and twice been defeated...
...Decoster: "I just wanted the court to know that I was sincere in writing this letter...
...Nothing much unusual so far, you must be thinking...
...he knew about markets and money...
...He ran it in earnest and for profit, writing 4,000-6,000 words a week, expanding its statistical coverage, insisting that it be written for businessmen and not the approving (but stingy) literati...
...He regularly misspelled names and misquoted authorities, often improving on the standard text...
...He, too, became mesmerized by psychiatry...
...The writing is fresh and vivid...
...Par for the urban course...
...Psychiatry has been his specialty, as he underwent psychoanalysis himself in the late 1940s (together with William O. Douglas)," and shortly thereafter laid down the Durham Rule, whereby "an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of a mental disease...
...And what was even worse, Judge Bacon felt, Holmes "was intensively interrogated for some four hours in the middle of the night after being whisked from a bus stop in the District of Columbia to a Maryland police facility," that is, he was improperly extradited...
...The Holmes case, Judge Bacon concluded, "should alert this community to the pressing need for facilities for mentally ill and mentally deficient juveniles...
...The touch is sustained...
...You can go out and fire a cannon through the judges' parking lot at 3:30 in the afternoon and catch two cars every day," he once said, "mine and [one other...
...Vols...
...I hit her lots of times...
...These were quite sinister euphemisms, as it turned out...
...The facts and faces, a hundred years old, are not a burden...
...A day or two later a suspect, Aubrey A. Dockery, 22, was charged with the crime...
...Shortly before sentencing Decoster wrote a letter to the judge, which led to the following exchange at sentencing: Judge: "....The court has received a long letter from the defendant himself, stating that he has learnedthe error of his ways and that he has found out that he was fooling with the wrong crowd...
...It constantly upset Halleck that other judges, especially federal judges, seemed not to be working as hard as he was...
...As for Joanie Bradley, Holmes told police he dragged her off to the woods, too, had sexual relations with her, and then "I tied her hands to the back with a sock...
...His prose has the gait of events...
...he had read for the law...
...Attorney put it, the government now not only has to prove the defendant guilty but prove, at the same time, that the defense is competent, too...
...The reason why so few good books are written," Bagehot declared, "is that so few people who can write know anything...
...defendants had to get their hair cut short before he would allow them out on personal bond, for example...
...President Johnson appointed the younger Halleck to the D.C Bench in 1965, when he was 35 years old and had a reputation as a conservative...
...But Decoster had fled the jurisdiction while out on bail and was only brought to trial when he was arrested and returned, charged with another crime...
...Only a wicked and corrupting society remained to be put to rights...
...A good deal of what he said made sense...
...As a local U.S...
...Attorney and said: "I can probably arrange for you to be appointed to fill my vacancy...
...Two years ago, the Graduate School at Columbia University announced a new program in financial writing, which it properly named for Bagehot...
...The police, it turns out, are accused of unlawful and coercive activity, not Holmes...
...Pitt's wit," he writes in a review essay, "was the best [Wilberforce] had ever known...
...Then came the all-too-familiar change, well summarized in the following paragraph from the Washington Post: "Halleck underwent a radical personal change in philosophy and lifestyle--but not in his colorful courtroom manner--in the early 1970s...
...Courts recently by Judge Charles W. Halleck, whose father was Gerald Ford's predecessor as House Minority Leader...
...I think I know what he meant...
...It is a relief to know that this wisdom is no longer quite so current, having been jeered at by a number of writers, including James Q. Wilson, a Harvard professor who, as M. Stanton Evans remarked recently, "obviously has tenure...
...Halleck, it turns out, is the Judge Who Went Too Far...
...This leads the judge to conclude that he is even more mentally ill than she had originally thought, and so in need of even more programs...
...A redfaced, choleric man, he immediately began shouting about "the system," the docket cluttered up with misdemeanor charges like marijuana possession while the murderers and armed robbers were kept waiting for months...
...In 1973 she ordered that one Edward J. Holmes, a 17-year-old who had been convicted of various offenses including burglary and Tom Bethell is a Washington editor of Harper's and a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...Unsupervised probation for five minutes...
...Bagehot makes of facts, the grist of leading articles, something immutable...
...The Alternative: An American S~ectator February 1977 7 nomination, and it was during this year, when his reappointment was in doubt, and when he could be expected to be on his best behavior, that his andes seem to become order than ever...
...Holmes just wasn't sane enough to know what it meant to waive his constitutional right to remain silent, Bacon argued on behalf of the murderer...
...Another time he threatened to take long lunches and "vacations in California" like the federal judges unless someone reduced the caseload...
...Be good now...
...The normal procedure if this happens is for the judge to issue a bench warrant for the man's arrest...
...Q 0 ~ o m I 0 ~ 0 6 0 B 0 D I D B I o I O 0 O ~ b I D ~ o ~ t B I Q I D I i 6 6 0 0 n D w t O 0 o 0 0 0 0 D 0 b m ~ 0 0 t ~ U I D O I 0 Q t I D D ~ 6 o n I O j I ~ 0 0 o t D j 6 0 . . . . U ~ O I ~ I I ~ U ~ . . . . . . . . ~ o ~ g l J ~ l i . . . . ~ O q I ~ B ~ D ~ Tom Betbell Psycho Justice Washington judges seem to have missed their true vocations as social workers or psychiatrists...
Vol. 10 • February 1977 • No. 5
