Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR CONFESSIONS In his otherwise admirable article ("Requiem for the Squealroom," NL, July 18), Sidney E. Zion, while conceding that the right against self-incrimination "makes...
...Indeed, in New York alone last year at least five "confessed killers" were released after indictment when it was shown that they did not commit the crimes...
...So the American Left, old and new, has a tremendous task...
...If the innocent arrestee may be "badly hurt" because the police cannot force the "guilty" to confess, then is the fault not with the cops...
...Yet it was the liberal Kerr who fanned the flames of public opinion when he told the Hearst press that nearly half the students who sat around the police car during the Berkeley rebellion were Maoist-Castroites...
...Perhaps-and this should be the hope of every liberal and so-called Socialist-the threat of the Right will give us the opportunity to bring real pressure on the Democrats, for this bloated, majority party is at its worse when it is least vulnerable...
...He doesn't want to be booked, mugged, jailed or compelled to put up bond...
...As to the innocent arrestee who wants to talk, I fail to see anything in the recent ruling that hinders him in any way from "confessing" his innocence...
...It was Governor Brown who, despite the wishes of the school administration, ordered the arrests of the students, and, later, it was Governor Brown's administration that contributed to the curbing of civil liberties by announcing that a peaceful Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) march through Oakland would lead to anarchy...
...Stanley Kauffmann...
...DEAR EDITOR CONFESSIONS In his otherwise admirable article ("Requiem for the Squealroom," NL, July 18), Sidney E. Zion, while conceding that the right against self-incrimination "makes enforcement more difficult and results in some guilty people going free...
...Why was the VDC allowed to create anarchy...
...When the VDC is allowed to parade, when the students win and are supported by the faculty, the public feels confused and sometimes frustrated...
...Chamberlain will recall that Whitmore gave a 61-page confession to the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert in 1964, only to have the charges dismissed when another man was arrested (and later convicted) of the crime...
...It is the same with the Vietnam war...
...Anybody who does agree with that suicidal notion should join Landauer and support the lesser evil, for, as President Johnson has shown us, the best way to make sure things get worse is to roll up a landslide for a lesser evil...
...Is he suggesting we scrap the Fifth Amendment in court as well...
...assures us...
...If the NLF dees not have popular support, and is nothing but an organization of Communist terrorists, why should we negotiate with them...
...all he wants is the privilege to tell the police why they should let him go home...
...Ronald Reagan is running against Governor Brown partly on a campaign to clean the Communists out of the University of California, and perhaps to fire Clark Kerr as well...
...I'm relatively sure that George Whitmore Jr...
...No one...
...For as Senator Wayne Morse (no doctrinaire foe of the Democratic party) has pointed out, the Democrats will continue their policies until they begin to lose elections because of it...
...If he alleges fear of self-incrimination he gains, not the right to silence, but merely the right to prevent his answer being read in evidence aeainst him at a subsequent trial...
...More's the pity, therefore, that he should fail to explain the practical objections to that decision, which are these: The extension to the station house of the privilege against self-incrimination is of virtually no use to the innocent but of immense benefit to the guilty...
...For example...
...No, the difference we have with Professor Landauer is much more basic: Should Leftists support the people who have made things worse...
...NEW LEFT Aside from the rather astounding assertion that Thoreau opposed government interference with property relations (presumably, then, Thoreau opposed any Federal attempt to end slavery), Professor Landauer's most recent "Open Letter to the New Left" (NL, August 1) offers nothing new...
...The New Left is trying to build a movement to defeat the liberals, but men like Professor Landauer should gratefully join it, being ever ready to return to the Democratic fold as soon as the war in Vietnam is over...
...Park Chamberlain Sidney E. Zion replies: The "cliche" cited by Lewis Mayers in his otherwise admirable letter was "rejected" by Professor Morgan in the following language: "The function which the police have assumed in interrogating an accused is exactly that of the early committing magistrates, and the opportunities for the imposition of abuse are fraught with much greater dangers...
...New York City Lewis Mayers Sidney E. Zion deserves congratulations for defending the Supreme Court's Miranda decision on the practical level...
...Is Chamberlain implying that the cops would frame the innocent man unless they could get the guilty one to talk, presuming they have him...
...The innocent arrestee wants to talk...
...And history, not all ancient, is loaded with other such examples...
...The film and the performance were praised by the English critic whom I most respect, John Coleman of the New Statesman, as well as by others, including John Mortimer in The Observer and Isabel Quigly in The Spectator...
...As for Mayers' "whole galaxy of legal thinkers," I would only ask that he open his eyes to another galaxy, slightly more up-to-date, namely Warren, Black, Douglas, Brennan and Fortas...
...West Redding, Conn...
...If China is fighting by proxy, then why should it go unpunished...
...My clippings are in New York so I cannot give quotations...
...Furthermore, this innocent arrestee needs the confession of the guilty one to complete his own exoneration, and may be badly hurt if such a confession is not forthcoming...
...It is too often overlooked that the privilege of withholding relevant evidence bv alleging (perhaps quite falsely) a fear of self incrimination, may result, not only, as Zion says, in a guilty person going free, but in an innocent person being convicted, because he is unable to compel the evidence which would clear him...
...Regarding the analogy to Canada: I do "doubtless concede" that it is a free society, just as last year I conceded that New York was a free society although it retained capital punishment...
...Canada, as Zion will doubtless concede, is a free society...
...Morgan and McGuire...
...San Diego, Calif...
...Any information yielded by his answer, however, is fully open to use by the prosecuting authorities...
...Will that permit more innocent men to go free...
...would disagree with Park Chamberlain's contention that the privilege against self-incrimination "is of virtually no use to the innocent...
...Professor, opposes reform, and no one thinks that things must get worse before they can get better...
...He also says that (if I may immodestly quote) I was alone among serious critics in liking the film of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor's performance...
...Moreover, whatever cogency Mayer's argument possesses would apply as strongly to the privilege against self-incrimination in the courtroom-indeed, more strongly...
...And the liberals logic doesn't end there: when the bombings of North Vietnam fail to stop the NFL, the real villain, China, will have to be attacked...
...Los Altos, Calif...
...Wherefore, while one may properly say, for example, that the right to counsel is designed to guard against the conviction of the innocent, and that any benefit it may hold for the guilty is a part of the price we pay for a free society, one may say of Miranda only that it provides special privileges for the guilty and special difficulties for the innocent, all of which merely enlarge the price we pay for judicial bungling...
...yet for three-quarters of a century the witness in Canada-even the grand jury witness-must answer every relevant question...
...as if the statement were axiomatic, that "this guarantee is the price of a free society...
...If the liberals who run the country are telling the truth, if there is aggression from the North, for example, then Barry Goldwater's policy of bombing North Vietnam makes sense-as bsth Lyndon Johnson and those who refused to support him realized before the election...
...Kerr and Brown are caught by their own lies...
...In any event, where is the innocent man going to find the guilty one so that he can "compel" the evidence to clear him...
...The guilty arrestee, on the other band, can afford to be booked, mugged, fingerprinted and jailed, as time and silence can be helpful to him in the concoction of an alibi, in the co-ordination of his story with those of his accomplices, and in many other ways...
...We must not only stop the reactionaries (those who call today for what the liberals will do tomorrow), but we must also defeat or change the liberals...
...How could President Kerr defend giving in to Communist students...
...It is simply that I like it better without the death penalty-just as I think some people would like Canada better if it adopted our Supreme Court's ruling on confessions...
...Jsmes R. Prickett SIMON In your August 29 letters column John Simon, who knows how much I admire him, says of English critics that their standards are generally higher than ours...
...Yet this clich?© has been rejected by a whole galaxy of legal thinkers, from Bentham to Cardozo, as well as by the leading contemporary writers on evidence...
Vol. 49 • September 1966 • No. 18
