TO PRESERVE LIBERTY
Sprayregan, Joel J.
To Preserve Liberty The Price of Liberty, by Alan Barth. Viking. 212 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Joel J. Sprayregen The editorial moaning while the front page gloats" was Thomas Wolfe's felicitous...
...One is tempted to wonder what effect a like year's exposure to the materials Barth studied would have on a journalist who was not already as perceptive of, and committed to, individual liberty...
...Who can say," Barth asks, "how many men have gone to the gallows or the gas chamber because they knew nothing about writs of habeas corpus or coram nobis or certiorari...
...The problems raised by such violations are brilliantly explored in The Price of Liberty by Alan Barth, an uncommonly gifted editorial writer for the Washington Post...
...Arrests "for investigation" or "on suspicion," though illegal, are widespread...
...Supreme Court decision...
...more than fifty per cent of all prisoners brought before the Chicago Felony Court in 1956 had been held for more than seventeen hours...
...Barth traces the historical and philosophical background of our constitutional safeguards against official oppression from the days of Star Chamber torture down to the more "refined" methods of modern policemen...
...Policemen callously invade the privacy of citizens' homes to conduct indiscriminate searches without warrants...
...So long as wire tapping is countenanced at all," Barth warns, "no one can be sure that his own telephone conversations are not being monitored . . . There is simply no way to confine [wire tapping] to those guilty of crime, or even to those suspected of crime...
...The failure of the press in many of our cities to attain the depth and perspective necessary to sustain meaningful attacks against important social evils is perhaps best illustrated in an area of basic concern to any free society: police violations of individual liberties...
...A steady stream of...
...The final chapter provides compelling insights into the futility and insensitivity of our methods of "punishing" violators (especially juvenile ones) of criminal laws...
...Reviewed by Joel J. Sprayregen The editorial moaning while the front page gloats" was Thomas Wolfe's felicitous way of describing what's wrong with American newspapers...
...And of course only a minute fraction of victims of the "third degree" are sufficiently persistent, affluent, or lucky to have the Supreme Court review their cases...
...coerced confession" cases continues to flow to the U.S...
...The presentation achieves a readable balance through discerning use of empirical data and the judicial literature, which of course includes many of the eloquent landmarks of our constitutional liberty...
...Flourishing private wire tappers are not prosecuted when uncovered because many law-enforcement agencies are reluctant to enforce a law which they themselves are violating...
...The Price of Liberty is a worthy successor to Barth's The Loyalty of Free Men, which remains (along with The Progressive's Forty-fifth Anniversary Issue) one of the few edifying monuments of the McCarthy era...
...What are the unwholesome practices...
...The book focuses in separate chapters on specific dangers presented by a number of unwholesome official practices...
...His concluding words are a useful invocation to the faith—and knowledge— we need to preserve our liberties against all those, however well-meaning, who would curtail them: "Liberty depends upon a recognition of two realities: first, that men who mean to enjoy it must run some risk for the sake of maintaining it...
...These chapters provoke consideration of an increasingly debated question: is all secret questioning of suspects by police inconsistent with the basic constitutional guarantees of the right to counsel and the privilege against self-incrimination...
...F.B.I, statistics report 100,000 such arrests by local police in 1959...
...Policemen detain suspects in the secrecy of the station house for lengthy periods in flagrant disregard of their clear legal duty to bring prisoners to court promptly...
...and second, that through excessive zeal, or through the incorrigibly corrupting influence of power, authority is forever in danger of overstepping its boundaries...
...Here the reader is challenged to rethink some basic social assumptions...
...He cogently relates this background to the present: "The benefits of due process are conferred not out of any sentimental regard for criminals but out of a recognition that without these benefits accused persons cannot effectively defend themselves against the overwhelming power of the State...
...Supreme Court despite the numerous decisions of the past twenty-five years which establish that the police many not extort a confession through physical—or psychological— coercion...
...And state prosecutors sought to use the illegally obtained evidence in court—until this practice was stopped last spring by a precedent-shattering U.S...
...Our shameful failure to provide counsel for poor persons charged with crime is recounted...
...Only since the Scotts-boro cases have the states been required to provide counsel in capital cases...
...The University of California at Berkeley, under a Ford Foundation grant, significantly added to knowledgeable understanding of constitutional liberty by allowing Barth to roam in its fertile intellectual pastures for a year and do much of the work which went into this book, as a research professor of political science...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
