Citizen Safeguards
Yarmolinsky, Adam
Citizen Safeguards The Defendant's Rights, by David Fellman. Rinehart. 365 pp. $5. Reviewed by Adam Yarmolinsky This painstaking account surveys all the safeguards that the law provides for...
...Perhaps there is a useful outlet for the book as a text for political science courses in colleges and universities, where the facts it presents can be dramatized by teachers like Fellman himself...
...Reviewed by Adam Yarmolinsky This painstaking account surveys all the safeguards that the law provides for persons accused of crime, or for those unfortunates involved in a loyalty, immigration, or passport proceedings, or a legislative hearing...
...Supreme Court interpreting the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and similar decisions of state courts...
...He makes no claims to original analysis, but his summaries of the state of the law are concise and accurate...
...Unfortunately, the book lacks excitement...
...It necessarily attempts only a preliminary exploration of „the major current problems of law-enforcement, such as the use of wire-tapping, or the provision of counsel for indigent criminal defendants...
...It may be captious to suggest that Fellman should have devoted his considerable talents to another kind of book on this subject...
...I can take issue only with his assertion that the "crux of the problem of a fair hearing in loyalty cases lies in the issue of confrontation...
...More central, it seems to me, is the inability of the employee to challenge the substantiality of the charges at the outset of the proceeding, to say, in effect, "So what...
...Fellman has done a careful and thorough job, rounded out by inclusion of the quasi-criminal defendants...
...Fellman says in his preface that he is writing for the layman...
...Beginning with the law of arrest, David Fellman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, summarizes the defendant's rights to bail and to proper notice of the charges against him, the elements of a fair hearing, the scope of jury trial, the right to counsel, the protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishments, the privilege against self-incrimination with principles enunciated in decisions of the U.S...
...The basic information he has to convey ought to be part of the intellectual equipment of every adult layman...
...But it is appropriate to ask whether an interpretive catalogue of this kind will be of interest to the general reader, or even to the general reader of The Progressive, and on this question I can only express reluctant doubts...
...It does not purport to be a history of the development of our fundamental liberties...
...It has little to say about what happens in fact to the average person who is arrested for a crime...
...If he appears at times a shade too respectful of the apparent logic of judicial language, his own writing is imbued with a deep concern for human liberty...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
