Contempt of Court & Respect for Law

...On other occasions it filled vacuums and led the country when the Administration and Congress failed or faltered, as when it declared in Brown vs...

...During the riots 7,200 persons were arrested, almost all of them people living at the poverty level and almost all black...

...He was defeated by Congress as well as by a great surge of popular opinion to maintain the integrity of the Court above political manipulation...

...a procedure that has, moreover, been the hallmark of totalitarian political systems in the recent past...

...The tenant must pay his rent no matter what fire hazards, plumbing defects, and general filth the landlord tolerates, often in violation of city ordinances...

...MYRA WOLFGANG is an international vice-presidentof the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union andthe secretary-treasurer of Local 705 of that union...

...We now have an Attorney General who has shown so little respect for the law that he has urged preventive detention of accused persons, a procedure that has not been acceptable under Anglo-Saxon law since the revolution against the Stuarts in England and the Revolutionary War in this country...

...I believe it is just as much a mistake to assume that all policemen violate the law or are brutes (or that the lower courts are not interested in doing justice) as to say that all residents of the ghettos are rioters and looters, or condone rioting and looting, or that all students are revolutionaries and participate in or favor breaking windows, setting fires, and throwing bombs...

...But the police do have their political biases and tend to support the ultraconservative factions in politics...

...Law has been at all times a weapon in the political process, an instrument for stabilizing or revolutionizing society...

...Some stridently emphasize the need for respect...

...In the one case the nominee was a man who showed no discretion about judging cases in which he had a financial interest and, in the other, a man who time and again had been overruled as a judge and was acknowledged to be "mediocre...

...They wanted an application of law that respected their constitutional right of free assembly and free speech...

...Nevertheless for all of these alleged looters the prosecutors demanded a large bail and it was granted by the judges, ranging from $10,000–$20,000 per person, "for men and women who had never had $500 at one time in their lives...

...It is hardly novel to say that people look at law from conflicting viewpoints...

...Under Attorney General Mitchell, the Justice Department filed a brief in support of a slick evasion of desegregation law, giving tax deductions for contributions to private schools in the South established to avoid public school desegregation...

...and his sentences, on the count under which the defendants were found guilty and on the contempt of court charges brought by Judge Hoffman himself, were so punitive as to cause disrespect of the judicial process...

...And we must be concerned not only with change in the here and now but also with the means by which change is brought about...

...The policeman will be put on the spot, not the criminal...

...On the same day the "hard hats" went to City Hall and forced officials to raise the Flag, which was flying at half mast...

...JAMES MARSHALL, a member of the New York Bar, has been president of the New York City Board of Education and an adjunct professor of public ad ministration at New York University...

...And both were correct...

...Supreme Court...

...But in another sense they expressed respect for law...

...Again the police did not intervene...

...Frequently the court has lagged behind the social and political thought of the times, while, on other occasions, it has led the country into new attitudes toward political and social problems...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried, in his way, to use the court for specific political ends...

...I certainly could not object to correcting violations by the JAMES MARSHALL Board of Education, but the danger to children from the neighboring shop was far greater, and it remained...

...To my mind, it was an act of contempt of the Supreme Court to propose such men as Judge Haynsworth and Judge Carswell for that bench...

...A few years ago there was Governor Kirk of Florida, who tried to overrule the federal court order requiring desegregation of schools in one Florida county...

...How are their rights and liberties protected by these instrumentalities of the law...

...In more recent years the Court, under Chief Justice Warren, was condemned for upholding the rights of defendants to counsel at all stages of criminal proceedings, for ruling against the use of confessions obtained under any kind of duress, and for protecting the civil liberties of persons accused of Communism...

...JESSE PITTS, a professor of sociology at OaklandUniversity, Michigan, is a coeditor of Theories of Society (1965) and coauthor of In Search of France (1963) . He has two books in progress, oneon the aborted May 1968 revolution in France andanother on the contrameritocracy...

...the prosecutor had moved for their release...

...The Court of Chief Justice Taney made the horrendous Dred Scott decision: its defense of the slave economy and the strict view of property rights prevalent in those days was so outrageous that it gave strength to the abolitionists and brought to their cause more moderate people, those who wanted only to prevent the extension of slavery, not its abolition...

...He and his wife haverecently returned to Caracas from an 11-months' trip through Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, gatheringmaterial for a book on the Andean revolution...

...I reported it to the proper authorities...

...He is completing a book on mobility, class, wealth, and power in antebellum America...

...If we are to have a stable society, we have a right to insist on respect for law...

...There have been a number of studies showing that the police treat white-collar people more leniently than blue-collar people...

...NORMAN GALL is a veteran Latin-American correspondent whose articles have appeared in a number of American magazines...

...He threatened to use force against the United States marshals and did not finally succumb until he had demonstrated to all students that if you didn't like a law and objected to a court order, you could defy them...

...Two police officers had been shot...

...But if we wish to isolate and contain them, the first thing to do is to make the courts more respectable and to have responsible people, from the president of the United States to trial attorneys and judges and the police, show less contempt of court and more willingness to abide by the law...

...And surely this violates a main purpose of the law, which is to give people a sense that if they have a legal cause, they will get a fair hearing whether they win or not...

...She heads the Coalition for Women's Advancement...

...but that does not make violence tolerable...

...The contempt of federal law shown in the JAMES MARSHALL recent past by Governors Wallace and Barnett is, of course, well-known...

...He is theauthor of Intention in Law and Society (1968) and Swords and Symbols (1969...

...On the whole, the movement was legitimated by the decisions of the U.S...

...But those biases have to be controlled if there is to be fairness...

...At the same time there is much evidence —recent articles in the New York Times on police corruption in New York City bear this out—that everybody in the slum areas of the big cities knows that the police know the people engaged in the numbers racket and those who push drugs, yet do not arrest them...

...MIECZYSLAW MANELI, former dean of Warsaw University's law faculty (dismissed in 1968 by thePrime Minister and charged with "antisocialistdidactic activities"), teaches political science atQueens College since 1968...

...T T o THE POOR MAN laws means the police and the lower courts, not the legislators and not the highest courts of the state or federal governments...

...It has given legitimacy to those who exercise sovereignty and has been used to put at least a coating of legitimacy over conquest and revolution...

...Instead they slapped violations on the school...

...The police surrounded a church in the neighborhood of the shooting and arrested 142 occupants, including women and children...

...We all try to forget the unpleasant...

...As a lawyer I cannot but feel that they did express contempt of court, as did their attorneys, by their disruptive procedure and refusal to express in an orderly way their objections to the rulings of the court...

...EDWARD PESSEN, a professor of history at BaruchCollege and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of Most Uncommon Jacksonians (1967) and Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, Politics (1969...

...AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS DAVID BROMWICH, an undergraduate at Yale University, contributed "Hollywood Discovers `TheRevolution'" to our November—December 1970 issue...

...they cannot be expressed theatrically in the course of a trial, or by excessive punitive sentences...

...He indicated bias...

...What a terrible example of respect for law it is when a court, attorneys, a president, an attorney general, and governors all defy the law...

...They had little or no financial means with which to defend themselves...

...and the charges trumped up against the Black Panthers by the Chicago police after the killing of a Black Panther leader by the police (which ended in a refusal by the grand jury to indict the Panthers and the discontinuance of prosecution by the prosecuting attorney) —all these are horror stories that not only are acts of disrespect for the law but incitements to further disrespect...

...People can only be a threat to themselves and our society if their behavior is in a context of general disrespect for the law...

...Those who have talked most loudly about law and order have treated the courts with the greatest contempt...

...and based on his experienceswith the International Control Commission in Vietnam (1954-55, 1963-64), to be published thisyear by Harper & Row...

...Another place, outside of the courts, where poor people see an example of disrespect for law is the frequent failure of landlords to obey rulings by the various city departments that inspect housing...

...Lao P. RIaUFFO, an acting instructor in AmericanStudies at Yale, is completing a study of the farRight in the 1930s and 1940s...

...In 1971-72 he will be a visiting professorof sociology at the University of Leicester, England...

...Those who violated laws were prepared to go to jail, in order to show their respect for the general principle of law...

...One may, however, question whether the prosecutor and the judges who set this bail were performing their duty in such a way as to create respect for the law, or were in fact succumbing to the popular hysteria...

...Angered by its declaration that some of the measures he sponsored for the economic recovery of the country were unconstitutional, he made his bid for reform of the Court...

...the indiscriminate shooting at Au gusta, Georgia, where six black men were CONTEMPT OF COURT & RESPECT FOR LAW killed by the police, all of them shot in the back, four of the six, at least, having been bystanders and not involved in any riot...

...This destroys the possibility of justice and is itself contemptuous toward the judicial process...

...Judge Crockett tells of another event in connection with the riots in 1967...

...and this, of course, undermines respect for law...

...But the small claims courts have been utilized as much by the loan sharks and the companies selling merchandise on credit to harass the poor as by the poor to get their own claims justly determined...

...Contempt of court has been an assault on sovereign power, a challenge to the authority of the state, and never merely a legal issue...

...their tactic was wrong, but nevertheless tactical...

...The civil rights movement, headed by such men as Martin Luther King and James Farmer, worked at times in defiance of the law and its enforcing authorities, not because of contempt for law itself but rather because of a belief in higher laws, in this case the Constitution and to some extent a conception of natural law...

...he engaged in undignified controversy with lawyers and defendants...

...William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, proclaimed, "Where law ends, tyranny begins...

...The poor in our society know the law mostly through their contact with the police...

...After a hearing by the judge, 130 of the 142 persons arrested were released because of lack of evidence...

...Some years ago small claims courts were created so that the poor could appear and state their causes without the need to pay lawyers...

...The Warren court was treated to some of the most astounding expressions of contempt of court by Senator Eastland and other members of the Congress...

...So, too, was the excessive bail which was later reduced...

...Let us assume that Detroit was in a state of shock, that there was real hysteria about...

...We point to rebellious youth, Black Panthers, rioters, revolutionary extremists: thes are dissatisfied people, and some of their dissatifactions are understandable...

...Without law, there is no avoiding a disorganized society, almost certainly to be followed by a neofascist tyranny...

...Among his works isa five-volume history of political juridical doctrines(Warsaw, 1962-68), and War of the Vanquished, written in the U.S...

...And the cold, unsympathetic regrets voiced by the president and the attorney general, along with the comments by the governors of Ohio and Georgia supportive of such acts, turn many youths and black people against a law whose enforcement officers kill so indiscriminately...

...All these incidents: the National Guard shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University, resulting in the death of four and followed by the exoneration of the National Guard by an Ohio grand jury...

...That we must expect...

...Similarly the Court gave leadership when it laid down the rule of one man-one vote and started to break up the system by which some legislators and congressmen were elected in the interest of party control rather than in the interest of voter equality...

...It is not when the law brushes over the unpleasant without perceiving any need for change but when law is prepared to face the unpleasant and to become a means of change that it is worthy of our respect...

...He has indicated that he would not abide by the Supreme Court rulings with respect to electronic surveillance and wiretapping and, unfortunately, this contempt of law has been repeated and greeted with approval by many members of Congress...

...others stridently express their contempt...

...So the Supreme Court became a hated, not a respected, court...

...In spite of my position, the reaction was that we shouldn't require the offending neighbor to reduce the hazard...

...RICHARD ROBBINS, a frequent contributor, teachesurban sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston...

...Both were clearly men of racial bias...

...WHEN COURTS are held in contempt and law is not respected, the stability of society is threatened...

...This is not very different from the position of a scientist who also has his prej udices but who must be aware of them and not permit them to color his scientific experimentation...

...CONTEMPT OF COURT & RESPECT FOR LAW T T HE SUPREME COURT has been a symbol of law as resting above the partisan realm of politics, and that is why, for over a century and three-quarters, the Supreme Court and its members have had so much prestige...

...In the lower civil courts, where again the poor have most of their contacts, as in the magistrates courts, the calendars in large cities are so vast that few people can feel that their cause has received adequate consideration...

...In violation of rulings of the Supreme Court and the Constitution, they refused to permit the arrestees to telephone or otherwise make contact with attorneys, relatives, or friends...

...Like all of us, judges naturally have their own biases...

...When we speak of contempt of law we think at once of the Chicago trial of eight men accused of a conspiracy to create riot and disorders during the Democratic Convention in 1968...

...Half of the cases were dismissed at the preliminary hearing for lack of evidence...

...Many of those who argue for "law and order" are in fact showing contempt for law, and many who now express contempt are in fact striving for a law that they can respect, a law that seems more just to them, institutionalized in courts that appear less biased...

...But in a good policeman, as in a good judge, personal opinion must be restrained in the interest of professional performance...

...Judge Julius Hoffman, on the other hand, did not express respect for law...

...Oliver Goldsmith wrote, "Law grinds the poor, the rich men rule the law...

...Nothing better illustrates disrespect for legal process than the recent slayings and persecutions of dissident students, protesting black people, and Black Panthers by police and National Guardsmen...

...DAVID MARTIN is a reader in sociology at the University of London...

...PRAN CHOPRA, our frequent correspondent in India, is a well-known journalist and former editor of the Calcutta Statesman...

...This contempt has come in our society from both the Right and the Left...

...Some 3,230 of the arrestees were charged with looting, a felony that made them subject to a five-year sentence...

...But how can the advocates of law and order be taken seriously by intelligent young people and the residents of slums, to whom law and order must mean law as people with power want it and order as they define it...

...One must wonder sometimes about the extent of the collusion between city inspectors and landlords...

...Many are paid to protect these law breakers, some are afraid to arrest them, and some believe that even if they arrest them their "protection" is such that there will be no conviction or only small penalities...

...Here, the chief law-enforcing agency of the country teaches a lesson to millions of black citizens: that what has been accomplished by law can be rejected by the enforcing authority...

...the killing of two black students and the wounding of nine others by the Highway Patrol at Jackson State College, and the fir ing of live bullets into a girls' dormitory there...

...The early opinions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall favored the policy of strengthening the federal government as against states' rights: whereupon the Jeffersonians vilified the Court...

...I remember when I was president of the Board of Education in New York City and found an extreme fire hazard in a metal shop next to an old school building...

...Judge George W. Crockett, Jr., the presiding judge of the Detroit Recorders Court in 1969, two years after the Detroit race riots, relates in the law publication Judicature one of the incidents of that time...

...The Court was accused of interfering with the police and coddling criminals...

...Thus, last year, when students were demonstrating in Wall Street against the Cambodian foray of President Nixon, and construction workers (evidently well organized) began to attack the students, the police stood aside and refused to intervene...

...THESE ARE REBELLIOUS DAYS, the kind of days in which we tend to become polarized about law...

...It has been, and still is, a social phenomenon, and therefore a proper subject for those who are concerned as thinkers or activists with politics and social behavior...

...Kansas that segregated education was unequal education...