Criminals Belong in Jail

...Merely” to ensure the safety of the community...

...The judge may not set financial conditions on release merely to ensure the’safety of the community...

...On that date the Bail Agency indicated he had been booked under a different name for a third firstdegree burglary...

...The problem lies here,” he said, taking his glasses off and shaking them at me...

...There had been publicity about him in recent weeks, since a judicial’ review commission had held...

...This, he said, was 25 to 30 per cent of all felony indictments...

...That would mean more addicts, more robberies...

...When government maintains peace and order,” Ervin said in the Senate on January 22, 1965, using an argument that would be repeated perhaps a hundred times, “it must exclude irrelevant factors-such as the ’ financial status of the accused-in determining his guilt or innocence...

...It was a murder,‘not an accident, committed perhaps only minutes before I arrived...

...It‘ needs to be repeated that the suspect is presumed innocent until convicted, and being in jail makes it much more difficult for him to present an effective defense at his trial...

...As for pretrial release, the “hard decision” is, surely, quite simple: the preventive detention statute needs to be disencumbered...

...There’s a lot of human misery all over this city, and mainly because there are people out on the street who shouldn’t be...

...I began to feel that I had accidentally fallen into a topsy-turvy world, like Alice in Wonderland...

...James Weeks had been living on A Street, S. E., “for one month...

...He mentioned one case which was publicized in the spring of 1975-U...

...Police have been searching for Roy and James Weeks, as well as Eunice Walker and Terry Ann Stewart, since July 11...

...I’ve heard lawyers defending multiple offenders tell the judge with a perfectly straight face, ‘Your Honor, my client has been charged 35 times, and he has shown up in court every time.’ Their long record is used as an argument to release them...

...First by Lee Cross, who spent some time in the Old Bailey courts during a vacation in London...

...With one exception, the suspect charged with a crime of vi0 len ce -rape, armed assault, murder-should not be released at all before trial...

...He’had to come down here a number of times, no job...

...She might be able to tell you more about the case, and about the Bail Reform Act .” Assistant U. S. Attorney Lee Cross, the deputy chief of the Grand Jury section, has worked in the U. S. Attorney’s office for four-and-a-half years...

...Mr...

...Although there had been a lot of implied criticism of judges in what the prosecutors had told me, they had carefully avoided mentioning names...

...The money that had been spent, the programs that had been forged, the good intentions that had been lavished upon the problem of crimehadn’t they begun to take effect finally...

...About 80 per cent of the D. C. judges are white-as is Halleck...

...Finally, in very rare cases, the defendant can be detained in jail until trial...

...Redemption should be no concern of the state...

...Catch-22 for prosecutors...

...The police can’t find them...

...Ervin stressed the “serious constitutional problems,” the “grave difficulties” in such a measure, and it was therefore deemed, “premature at the time the bail reform bill was drafted...

...It Is the American Way’ Hume continued briefly on the subject of lenient sentencing-% defect in the present system of criminal justice as pervasive as the pretrial release of suspects who may reasonably be presumed to be dangerous...

...I remember the case,” said Judith Hetherton...

...Again an aide tugged, but again he paid no heed...

...I prepared a memo for Earl Silbert, the U. S. Attorney, in April of 1975...

...Another columnist who cast the issue in conveniently racial term, thus making his plea for the defeat of the bill seem like a plea to end racial discrimination, was Tom Wicker...

...Thus the Bail Reform Act of 1965, which applied to federal jurisdictions, applies to all crime in Washington...

...The bill was heralded and trumpeted by Senator Sam Ervin so successfully that there is no evidence, in the Congressional Record, of any demurring senator speaking up at all...

...Amtrak officials said they believed McCrea was on his way home when the apparently random killing occurred...

...The Vera report on the bail project does not specifically list what offenses its 3,500 released suspects had been charged with, but there is some doubt as to whether anything other than misdemeanor cases were involved...

...She and her boyfriend, Henry Miller, were walking down 33rd Street, heading for an M Street restaurant...

...We have too many cases, and so the backlog is too great...

...This, in fact, would bring the American system more into line with the British system, which was on several occasions held up as a paragon during the congressional debate of the Bail Reform Act...

...But preventive detention is so hard to apply it’s not used very often,” Lee Cross continued...

...He was then convicted of the murder charge and was sentenced to 9 to 27 years, the sentence to run concurrently with the eaflier sentence...

...in which the rights of accused criminals are thought of ‘as having to balance the rights of the rest of society...

...We ought-to be trying felonies...

...and the government has to show that no other condition will reasonably assure the safety of the community...

...Ervin sponsored the bill, Senator Roman Hruska co-sponsored it...

...Under the provisions of the Social Security Act, they can go and get a job as a plumber, say, in Seattle, Washington, use their social security numbers, and Social Security won’t give that information to the FBI, even though they’re wanted for armed robbery...

...Young people were the worst offenders, with more than four-fifths of all serious crime being committed by those under 30...

...Were we not merely the lucky ones who didn’t get caught...

...What’s the public upset about...

...The Washington Post, be it said, did not join in the chorus...

...Experience has shown murder suspects to be well behaved while awaiting trial, particularly in comparison with suspects in certain other types of cases-for example armed robbery...

...It is tempted to take care of itself, to build a white middle-class enclave protected by police measures...

...Instead of making the hard decision, we lower the standards for all...

...Defendants don’t “present” a defense at trial (or don’t have to, at any rate), their lawyers do, and defense lawyers are entitled to interview their clients in prison...

...That was the guy who didn’t rob me.’ Just like that, when earlier they have told us who it was...

...Now you should talk to John Hume...

...By 1970 the problem that Senator Ervin had belatedly commented onthe absence of preventive detentionwas becoming painfully obvious in the District of Columbia...

...We have no psychiatric training, all it is is a guess...

...This, I feel, is the more realistic view...

...How could such brief residences be construed as evidence of “ties to the community,” I wondered...

...Very soon we must come to our senses and realize that there is something very wrong with a society in which, in the name of the presumption of innocence, the suspect is freed and the witness must then be protected...

...And if he goes wrong, then there is usually little hope of redemption-at least outside a church...

...She lit a cigarette and considered the question before continuing: “So many judges look at it from a middle-class perspective...

...The Law Enforcement Assist an ce Administration had spent $4, billion, and in doing so it had searched for ever more “innovative” solutions...

...whoever urged that suspects charged with violent crimes be locked up before trial was alleged to hold the Constitution in low esteem, if indeed he had ever heard of it...

...But Newman released the man on his own recognizancethat is to say, set him free, without requiring him to pay any bail-until his trial date...

...If this remedial step is taken, the Post said, “the public’s right to reassurance will not necessarily outweigh the suspect’s right to freedom before trial...

...The bill finally passed in the House by a record lopsided vote-yeas, 3 19...

...Here’s another item from The Washington Post I missed before setting off on my evening walk: “Recently revised park police statistics show intense criminal activity on the Monument grounds during the afternoon hours of Human Kindness Day...

...And here are some statistics we don’t have,” said Cross...

...But the most interesting revelation in the editorial was that the judge had, in fact, followed the letter of the law, which was itself complicated by the following turn of events: Originally, judges had the power to hold defendants in jail for trial in capital cases...

...As the foremost victims of a discriminatory social system the blacks provide the heft of the street criminals who are most likely to be jailed ‘preventively.’ ,’ The New York Times delivered itself of frequent editorials on the subject, the words “repression” or “repressive” occurring almost every time...

...160 indictments in my court in eight weeks...

...T.0 get the exact figures you should talk to Peter Chapin, who is in charge of the Felony B.ench Warrant section, and John Hume, chief of the Felony Trial section...

...Mr...

...This type of operation allows body waste to be passed into a disposable plastic bag attached to the new opening...

...How many.people are deterred from reporting crime because of probation and bail...

...But it seemed clear that HaUeck was someone they had in mind...

...Weren’t we “turning the corner,” especially in Washington, D. C., the home of good intentions...

...In 1974, this sum, at the federal, state, and local levels, had reached $14 billiop a year...

...Waggonner of Louisiana, who had the foresight to ask: “Could the gentleman from New York [Emmanuel Cellerl tell me what the situation would be should capital punishment be outlawed, and with what we would then be faced...

...It isn’t easy to track these people...

...This ordering of priorities disturbed me, with its implication that if only the victims of crime can be “paid off,” then society and its criminals will once again be in a state of balance...

...Park Police reported 468 robberies alone on May, 10 on the Washington Monument grounds-more than half the total of 733 robberies reported by D. C. police throughout the rest of the city for the entire month...

...There were many problems in need of a solution-the poor to be treated with greater consideration, the blacks to be given equal treatment, the hungry to be fed-but no problem, surely, was so intractable that it could not be dealt with by a judicious admixture of goodwill, money, and kindly government programs...

...go out and have lunch and talk it over...

...I .” “You know, if a Martian were to come down here, he wouldn’t believe it,” Lee Cross went on...

...While he was in the house, he looked around and saw that he was in the house of the man who would be trying him the next day, in the house with his one-year-old son...

...A girl named Sally Ann Morris had been shot in Georgetown...

...She went to ask the judge’s permission, returned, and said it was okay...

...The information about “well behaved” murder suspects is highly misleading, however, because about half of all the murder cases the courts deal with involve a marital or domestic flare-up, a “crime of passion” (often helped along by a readily available handgun), in which it is generally safe to assume that the attacker does not have a criminal disposition, is immediately docile following his or her assault, and can be relied upon not to repeat it...

...The case was influential...

...I spoke first to assistant U. S. Attorney Judith Hetherton, who handled the Sally Ann Morris case in Arraignment Court...

...in which the concept of punishment has been almost entirely discredited...

...First of all, Lebby was convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon...

...The suspect was convicted a few days later...

...The District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction, and so it is important to bear in mind, in trying to understand D. C. crime, that what would be a state crime anywhere else becomes subject to federal court procedures in Washington...

...In most cases youronly have to put up one tenth of the amount, so the figure is meaningless, but it makes the judges look good because it seems as though they are setting high bonds...

...Ervin’s technique was to make oratorical statements so preeminently reasonable that no one with a speck of human decency could disagree...

...I hadn’t realized that “preventive detention...

...When I was in Arraignment Court two years ago, we did not get money bond in as many as 25 per cent of the cases...

...What you read about in the Post and the Star is just the tip of the iceberg...

...If the trial is speedy, the suspect on pretrial release is less likely to be rearrested within the first month after his initial arrest...

...Mere Community Safety’ -~ I decided to visit the D. C. Superior Court where, I hoped, I would be able to find out more about the Sally Ann Morris case, and the Bail Reform Act itself...

...Of course, the victim would have liked a job, too...

...Washington is second only to Cleveland in homicides, second only to Boston in robberies...

...I asked Lee Cross...

...Senator Tydings said: “Such unfortunate cases mock the presumption of innocence, and threaten the democratic values which that presumption protects...

...Or take the case of the person who is arrested right at the scene of the crime...

...And the rising liberal sympathy for the criminal became a tide...

...But in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court “effectively abolished capital punishment in the District of Columbia...

...I had a defense attorney tell me about a case the other day, a client who pleaded guilty to forgery in return for a likely probation sentence...

...We can’t’ talk here,” he said, t...

...The problem is we have too many cases...

...A couple of months after that Lawrence Meyer noted in the Post that “in contrast to the optimism of the 1960s that crime and other social problems could be , brought under control, a consensus is developing among those who study crime that the little that can be done will have only a marginal effect...

...What about the violent offenders, I asked...

...But it is the American way,” Hume concluded...

...If they’ve lived for years in the District, the judges tend to be impressed that they have ties to the community...

...He’s a first offender, and he gets probation...

...As a result, whoever called for harsher treatment of violent offenders was often subtly painted as a racist...

...The liberal usually spoke as the reasonable man who merely opposed unfairness and inequality...

...The time has come for Congress to hold oversight hearings on the Bail Reform Act and the way in which it is working in practice,” the editorial continued...

...when two men approached...

...Then Judge Halleck himself swept into his chambers-during a recess in a trialand unbuttoned his long black robe...

...These are the highwaymen of our time...

...Of those arrested on felonies, I would guess that 65 to 85 per cent are back on the street before trial...

...I asked Hume to tell me how he felt about the accused murderer having come over to his house that day...

...Of the cases that were then recommended for release on recognizance, a further one third were not released by the judgesundoubtedly the most serious remaining cases...

...Abe Fortas,: who was then with the Washington law firm -of Arnold, Fortas and Porter, had set the pace, having championed the cause of an indigent convict in Florida named Clarence Earl Gideon, who was a harmless repeater, of the type that in England is ‘known as an “old lag...

...These standards limit pretrial detention to those cases in which the suspect is a drug addict or had a prior record of violent crime .” With capital cases no longer in existence, then, the Post recommended that Congress “remedy this anomaly by reinstating the discretion [to] judges in cases involving the most serious crimes of violence...

...Of the felony cases that we have indicted,” he said, “we have 500 fugitives right now...

...A warrant will have been issued for the arrest of the defendants...

...We have two or three good cases a day dismissed because we can’t get the witnesses to come down here...

...He pointed out a passage he had marked in this classic, and finally, reluctantly, allowed himself to be dragged back into court, declaring as he went that 40 to ,50 per cent of the arrests in the U. S. were for drunkenness...

...Heroin purity is up, too-from two per cent in 1973 to five per cent today...

...The magistrate found it hard to believe that all this complex procedure had to be gone through merely to decide whether the man should be detained before trial...

...The suspect in the P Street case is far from the only person to be freed here in recent years while facing a trial that could end in a life sentence...

...Although in other respects Goldfarb’s liberal credentials are in perfect order, his advocacy of preventive detention is seen as a sign of incipient fascism...

...It felt like a burning needle that went through me real quick...

...And there was this: “Police said the two men had been committing armed robberies in Georgetown for several weeks before the Morris shooting, escaping by hiding in the back seat of a getaway car driven by the women...

...Again, you can’t expect the victim to believe his attacker is innocent until he’s been brought to trial.’’ According to one study, as many as 1,000 cases in D. C. are dropped each year because of witness intimidation...

...He made a sweeping motion with his hands...

...What about the suspects having been released...

...About a month later I read another and in some ways more remarkable story by Ron Shaffer in the Post about a different case...

...Nevertheless, from whatever vantage point you observed the spreading evil of crime (“problem” seems too mild a word), it was becoming clear by the mid-1970s that the liberal solutions of the past decade had not worked...

...About 5,000 serious crimes a month are, reported in D. C. There are 8,000 robberies, 40,000 burglaries per annum in the capital city...

...It goes through the conditions of release to ensure appearance at trial, such as third-party custody by parents or an organization, or placing restrictions on travel, or requiring an appearance bond or a surety bond...

...The day before the trial Hume’s wife had to leave, so they had a baby-sitter come over...

...But to answer your question about the Sally Ann Morris case, if the defense lawyer can persuade the judge that there is no danger of flight, then there is no reason for not releasing the defendant on his personal recognizance...

...I’m going to co-author an article with a psychiatrist...

...As an indication of the relative affluence of many criminal suspects, this is regarded as being a much stricter parole condition...

...Gallup polls have shown that one household in four was hit by crime in the past year, one American in two is afraid to walk in his neighborhood at night...

...Here, at last, one or two cogent objections were raised...

...Jonas: Is it fair to say that we are dealing here with a body of law almost outside crimes of violence...

...Originally he was arrested for second-degree burglary...

...The problem was left for the Nixon Administration to deal with-and be blamed for...

...You can’t predict lethality,” he said...

...It’s disturbingly frequent,” she said...

...Capital cases no longer exist...

...So what does the victim think...

...The Bail Reform Debate The perception of the criminal as a poor and downtrodden victim of society seemed to underlie almost every comment made during the congressional debate on bail reform, although there wasn’t much debate...

...other rooms with rows of seats bolted together, where waiting witnesses sometimes lay horizontally, giving the impression of a railway station at 2 a.m...

...How often do defendants released without bail not show up for trial...

...Suspicion, barely concealed hostility, was the response...

...By the time of trial he had been laid off his job...

...And this was not just because the prisons were rotten, or because the programs weren’t “innovative” enough, or because too many hookers and drunkards were being arrested, or because there weren’t enough judges or clerical workers, or because not enough money was being spent...

...No more judges, fewer staff people...

...the defendant has to be brought to trial within 60 days, he has to have been convicted of a violent crime within the past ten years...

...As for the preventive detention statute, the most frequently heard complaint about it has become that it is not used often enough...

...So the Nixon Administration proposed the D. C. Crime Bill, with a preventive detention clause...

...I looked through the file, but it was hard to unravel the legal jargon...

...Doctors had to perform a colostomy, rerouting the undamaged intestinal tract to a substitute opening in her lower abdomen...

...in which the convicted robber is given a job by the judge instead of a sentence, and his victim is allowed to go jobless...

...I tried to tell the girl what she did was wrong,’ the lawyer told me, ‘but she thinks I’m crazy...

...I argued for a money bond, but the judge didn’t grant it...

...whoever argued that prisons were primarily for punishment and only secondarily “correctional facilities,” as they are often today officially dubbed, was surely an anachronism from the Stone Age...

...14 per cent are rearrested and charged with other crimes...

...And this is so especially if he is a “youthful offender...

...If we do not, then the society which The New York Times feared was approaching, in which there will be a “new disrespect for the law,” will very soon come to pass, if indeed it has not already arrived...

...Then he’s convicted, let’s say...

...Experience under it is beginning to raise questions as to whether the rights of the public are being adequately protected...

...He was then picked up and sentenced on the second dangerous-weapon count, for which he got 30 to 90 months...

...What was the article about...

...Too Many Cases’ I approached Judge Halleck’s chambers with curiosity...

...I spoke to John Hume next, on the third floor of the Pension Building...

...Gideon had been convicted of burglary without benefit of defense counsel and was fighting a lonely battle, so it seemed, to have the U. S. Constitution applied fairly and equally, for the benefit of the poor as well as the rich...

...The only objection to the measure came from bail bondsmen,” Ervin later reminded the Senate...

...whoever called for less lenient judges was viewed as a primitive lacking in higher education ; whoever demanded longer sentences was, surely, insensitive to the social roots of crime...

...Under certain circumstances, he may even be able to pay his bond with the money he has stolen from a robbery victim...

...Grotesque tales were told of wicked bail bondsmen crossing state lines and kidnapping their fugitive charges...

...It’s no use your looking through those cases,”’he told me...

...Sometimes they disappear completely...

...Meanwhile the judge in the new case will release him again, so that he may be on the streets for seven or eight months pending trial, because to set a bond you have to show likelihood of flight, not danger to the community...

...But here’s the main point...

...But the Logm Circle liberals who are fixing up the old houses are upset because of the prostitutes and...

...I realized for the first time how the witness feels when he sees that the person who attacked him is back out on the street before the trial...

...I strode off confidently into the night...

...The court ordered a $2,000 surety bond, which meant he had to pay $200...

...and prosecutors with piles of documents under their arms (generally they looked harassed...

...This denial of access to what is supposedly a public record was later repudiated by a spokesman for Chief Judge Harold H. Greene...

...Let’s put a stop to that foolishness...

...Of course, if he fails to pay the cash or surety bond, he also goes to jail until trial...

...The defense attorney later told me that the kid quit the job a few days later-it was hard work...

...If you had more intelligent criminals, a lot fewer would show up, I can tell you that...

...Here I’m doing for society what the Baptist minister is supposed to do...

...If it’s suddenly dropped, he’ll know why...

...What happens...

...In some cases, the witnesses are locked up for their own protection, the alleged criminal goes free...

...Anthony Lewis, for example, who in 1964 had written the admirable study of the Gideon case, would have this to say six years later about preventive de tention : “And so the majority wearies of the effort to work out the difficult problems of race and poverty...

...I recalled Lee Cross’ response on this point: “What kills me,” she said, “is when the person listed as ‘friend’ is the codefendant in the crime...

...This bail project was undoubtedly highly influential in persuading Congress to vote for the Bail Reform Act...

...For a professional person a felony conviction is a serious matter: it’s on his record, he loses the right to vote, loses the right to get certain government jobs, various trades won’t take convicted felons, you can% practice law, and so on...

...How many people go to police line-ups and don’t identify the person because they know he’s already made bail...

...A man named Aubrey Dockery was soon arrested and charged with murder...

...to appreciate finally that a system where such things happen has become intolerably wicked and corrupt...

...Extreme cases of injustice were quoted, for instance that of a man who spent 54 days in jail awaiting trial on a traffic violation for which the maximum penalty was five days...

...The problem is that built into the optimistic rhetoric of the past decade is a “liberal” view of man which seems to be unrealistic in the extreme...

...With a surety bond, a bonding company must agree to pay the bond...

...This was the time when it became a tiny bit fashionable (although a touch risky) for northerners from wealthy backgrounds to spend a long, hot summer in Mississippi and, by the same token, equally fashionable (although not at all risky) for liberal lawyers, often working for firms with a healthy corporate practice, to take up the cause of defendants’ right...

...After the bill had passed the Senate, without any record of a dissenting vote, Ervin (rather late in the day, one might think) brought before his colleagues an ominous matter: “This bill does not deal at all with one serious ancillary problem studied by the subcommittee,” he said, “-the concept of the ‘preventive detention’ of an accused person on the grounds that his liberty might endanger the public welfare because of his predisposition to commit further crimes, intimidate witnesses or destroy evidence...

...By the same token, however, he can be restored to his original virtue by programs, reeducated by educators, corrected through the good offices of a panoply of contemporary social sciences, manipulated, if need be, by the most modern techniques...

...According to the traditional view, however, man is to a very large extent “born” the way he is...

...I knew about the D. C. crime problem, of course, the problem that besets not only the nation’s capital but all other large American cities, but this was, after all, one of the safest areas of Washington-just off Embassy Row...

...The Sally Ann Morris case you are referring to-we have much worse ones than that, where the witness and suspect live together on the same block and know one another...

...Allright...

...Boswell had several cases pending...

...not his colorful courtroom manner-in the early 1970s...

...Would money repair Sally Morris’ intestinal tract...

...I asked the law clerk if I could see the Boswell case...

...Personal recognizance was not recommended by the Bail Agency...

...At least until this discovqry is made, all of us should be able to agree that the criminal justice system must be changed to make it protect society...

...So my criticism of the system is that it tries to do too much for too many...

...organizations such as Bonabond, founded by ex-convicts in 1966, may agree to accept custody of defendants awaiting trial...

...Fortunately for us, most of them aren’t too bright...

...We judges are the ones that get dumped on...

...While working on this article, I was given two comments on the British system...

...The all-important resulting statistic was that only about one per cent of those released on their own recognizance had failed to appear in court for trial, as against a normal threepercent forfeiture of bail bonds...

...Up 15 per cent in D. C. last year, up 17 per cent in the nation, according to FBI statistics...

...In the remaining cases Vera workers interviewed suspects at length, and in some cases recommended release on recognizance...

...nays, 14...

...hearings to determine whether he was qualified as a judge...

...Here’s one: U. S. v. Raymond Boswell...

...What was going on here...

...With a cash bond, the suspect can put up the money himself...

...He is born, moreover, in a state of sin, not primal innocence...

...The defendant was convicted, but he had no prior convictions...

...Hume then introduced me to Peter Chapin, a curly-haired man whose office was across the hall and who was in charge of the “felony fugitive program-designed to keep track of felony fugitives,” he explained, adding that there was a “backlog of approximately 530 felony bench warrants ranging from unauthorized use of a vehicle up to first-degree murder...

...Anyone want to rob someone, come and rob me...

...Gideon’s case became, in the hands of New York Times correspondent Anthony Lewis, not merely a fascinating legal case study but literature as well, and was praised in print by a Supreme Court Justice, Truman Capote, David Brinkley, Edward Bennett Williams, and Paul Freund of the-Harvard Law School...

...If we could cut down on the cases and bring the remaining ones to trial within 30 to 60 days, the crimes by those on pretrial release would be cut way down...

...Did not that raise a more urgent issue...

...She had time to talk, as it turned out, because she was waiting for her 7 p. m. appointment...

...And by 1975, as James Q. Wilson and others were beginning to say, the problems of crime were looking insoluble...

...that is, made easier to apply...

...But I was cheerfully ignorant of these figures as I walked ,along, until...

...Who did4 work for...

...I don’t know the details of the case,” she said when I mentioned Sally Ann Morris...

...The “deeply troubling question” was: “Does this procedure adequately irotect the community...

...Your -First Robbery Is Free’ “Often the defendant is back on the street before the victim leaves the hospital,” Cross said...

...He was arraigned the next day before D. C. Superior Court Judge Theodore Newman, Jr., and assistant U. S. Attorney John Gizzerelli asked the judge to hold Dockery on a $10,000 bond...

...So that’s what they mean when they say the first robbery is free...

...meant holding suspects charged with such crimes as murder and rape prior to trial...

...They’ll say to me: ‘But he’ll be out in no time...

...Preventive detention is class legislation, particularly in the District, where its burden will fall with precision on black people...

...But with one third of our misdemeanor calendar we’re talking about prostitution-not dangerous...

...And so the criminal became, for many people of at least moderate means and liberal disposition, largely sentimentalized...

...You should talk to Lee Cross...

...By 1972, with the abolition of capital offenses, the Bad Reform Act became even more untenable...

...Meanwhile The New York Times and many other newspapers took up the cudgels on behalf of bail reform...

...Why should the man who can afford to post a bond be permitted to go free between arrest and conviction . . . while the poor man must remain in jail?’’ The Manhattan Bail Project, financed by the Vera Foundation, was cited time and time again, both in Congress and out...

...He was a refrigerator.repairman, who had gone into a woman’s house and had found her there alone...

...At last he goes to prison-maybe...

...to make what John Hume called the “hard decision...

...Also, the suggestion that defendants in jail find it difficult to present an effective defense is not plausible...

...the major defect was conceptual, not practical...

...He now awaited Senate confuma tion...

...That’s all she cares about.’ She beat the system, in other words...

...Right...

...In many cases, these sentiments of optimism and goodwill were tinged with guilt, because have we not all come close to committing a crime...

...That seemed odd, I thought...

...A major problem, as he points out, is that most people don’t understand what the term means...

...It was but a small step from this to the Miranda and Escobedo decisions, to the Supreme Court that saw itself more and more as an institution of crusading reform, and to the Bail Reform Act of 1965...

...Yet the statistics cited by Vera Foundation personnel are grotesquely at odds with what was later found to be the case in the District of Columbia, where, according to the D. C. Bail Agency, nine per cent of the total number of suspects released on recognizance fail to appear later, and among those with felonies it is between 25 to 30 per cent...

...And what do they get out of it...

...Chapin lit a pipe and reached for a file...

...But he still got probation...

...For the past six months Hume has been head of the Felony Trial section in the U. S. Attorney’s office...

...Finally they had ag?eed that he was “qualified,” but not “well qualified,” and President Ford had reappointed him...

...One person I spoke to would say only that, from the prosecutor’s point of view, the black judges tend to be better than the white ones, because they have more “street sense...

...Besides, wasn’t the crime problem here gradually improving...

...he asked me suddenly...

...A girl was quite seriously injured...

...Following its passage in the Senate, the bill was debated in the House of Representatives in 1966...

...But now, in Washington, D. C., as a result of the Bail Reform Act-whose major statistical support was provided by the Vera study-accused murderers and rapists with a very good motive for not showing up in court are routinely released on recognizance...

...What they hope to do,” he wrote, “is chilling-preventive detention of those who might commit a crime if released or bail...

...Then the case goes to trial, and you lock up the jury...

...As a result, theSPost editorial continued, “the most violent and wanton crimes are now handled under the extremely rigorous and restrictive standards that - a1 t oge t her p roperly-were originally written for the less serious cases...

...I had a case once, a victim in an armed robbery...

...I take it that the suspects didn’t show for a preliminary hearing...

...They were arrested on two separate charges that evening,” she went on...

...No financial condition may be imposed to assure the safety of any other person or the community...

...I’m walking close to the P Street Bridge and there’s been an accident, apparently, the circling red light of an ambulance, police cars, a sheet on the road...

...In The Washington Post I had read that “Halleck underwent a radical change in philosophy and lifestylebut...

...In England, we’d have just held him in jail,” the magistrate remarked...

...He was out on parole on this conviction when he was rearrested and charged, once again, with assault with a dangerous weapon...

...The following colloquy suggests that the Bail Reform Act, as it has worked out in practice, at least in D. C., went way beyond the intent of Congress...

...Instinctively, Miller grabbed her and they started to run, After a few steps, she said, she heard gunfire and felt a slap at her back...

...If a psychiatrist can’t tell, how can I? There is ’no’ way a judge can predict what a man will do...

...Herbert Sturz, the executive director of Vera, was quoted as saying: “I don’t know of any serious crimes committed by people released in the bail or summons projects...

...Following conviction, the violent offender should be put in prison, and, if he has a prior criminal record, kept there...

...The exception is the crime resulting from a domestic quarrel, where the accused may be assumed not to repeat a similar act...

...Before seeing Hume the next day, I went to the Bench Warrant section and requested to see the “jacket” on cases’48406 and 48407, for James A. Weeks and Roy Wade Weeks, the’ male suspects in the Sally Ann Morris case...

...A few days later I read a Washington Post editorial on the P Street Bridge incident...

...To hold them, you have to use preventive detention,” Lee Cross went on, “ and you will recall the screaming that went on among liberals when that was passed by Congress...

...one, for example, was by Rep...

...Once again he was convicted, but once again was out on parole, this time to await sentencing on the second conviction...

...Shut the courthouse doors...

...Two things, Crime in the street...

...I had been under the impression that it was some sort of repressive scheme to lock up radicals-devised by President Nixon, no doubt...

...In such cases as these, the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a pure legal abstraction, you have to remember...

...An aide tugged at his...

...Or if caught, the ones who could afford to pay a lawyer and thus buy our way out of trouble...

...In some circles, a mood of outright pessimism has taken hold...

...He received no substantive answer, and The Washington Post, of course, was asking essentially the same question nine years later...

...We keep him on fiveday hold and ask the judge to revoke his probation for the first offense...

...Many of them come to arraignment, learn about the strength of the case, and don’t come back...

...in which convicted armed robbers immediately roam the streets after they have been sentenced...

...There was, according to a strict interpretation of the law, no way of holding dangerous suspects in many cases...

...Say a man is convicted of armed robbery...

...And just as the blacks had been mistreated, so had many criminals, in the view of a good number of repentant and self-accusing Americans...

...in which “your first robbery is free...

...The practice is, in fact, not uncommon...

...Or they come down here and say things that just aren’t so, Like, ‘I saw him standing by the truck, but I didn’t see him getting out of the truck.’ Or they’ll say: ‘No, that isn’t the guy who robbed me...

...Why did I want to see it...

...And this unbelievable paragraph: “Compounding all this is the fear that the ordeal is not yet over and that her assailants may return to kill her...

...Well, it upset me,” Hume said...

...Anotherand very lenient-possibility is thirdparty custod...

...Okay, some egregious cases,” he said, “but bear in mind that these are not typical cases...

...At large again, he shot and killed a policeman...

...What you have to realize about Vera,” said former Justice Department official Donald Santarelli, “is that they set out to prove a point even before they had any statistics, and they subsequently proved it...

...But there is still a widespread tendency to sentence under the Youth Act...

...The cries of horror that went up from certain columnists and editorial writers now seem immoderate and, in fact, extremist in nature...

...It’s a public document...

...The friend turned out to be the man charged with murder...

...The desirability of jailing murder suspects is not so obvious as it might look at first glance,” the Post cautioned...

...The number of police seemed to be making no difference to the crime problem, nor did the amount of money spent...

...This means that he will be eligible for parole once again after nine years...

...God only knows why...

...The government has to reveal practically its whole case to show probable cause to the judge...

...Here the presiding judge (they work in this court for a month on a rotating schedule) makes the decision as to whether the defendant shall be released on recognizance, or released on a money bond, or detained in jail while awaiting trial...

...The answer, I should have thought, was so obvious that the question would give me no trouble at all...

...In fact, a cynic could point out that the more money was spent on crime, the more crimes were committed...

...and with its familiar suggestion that money can solve all problems, including criminal assault...

...He may only do that if the prosecutor shows likelihood of flight by the accused...

...So there’s a freeze on...

...Four suspects arrested in the case, who were released on personal recognizance, pending trial, promptly disappeared and are at large today...

...A defense attorney just told me that two clients told him: ‘Your first robbery is free.’ Routinely they get probation for armed robbery...

...It sort of numbed me.’ . . .The bullet ripped through her intestinal tract and lodged in her lower abdomen...

...Crime is increasing at a record rate,” according to The Washington Post...

...e. serious crimes) had increased 82 per cent, while the amount of money spent on trying to combat crime had more than doubled...

...By this time, however, a good deal cf damage had been done by the “liberal” rhetoric of the previous decade...

...The only thing they worry about is getting time...

...With a stick-up in D. C.,” Hume went on, “if the person is 18 to 22, he can commit two or three or four felonies and keep going down to Lorton for a handslapping under the Youth Corrections Act-six months to a year for even the most heinous crime...

...Were all the cases I wanted to see in Halleck’s court...

...Most of them just aren’t going to be turned into law-abiding citizens, but after six months most of them are right back in the community...

...All you’re doing is fueling public sentiment against judges...

...There is a variety of reasons...

...One person who worked on the Vera project, incidentally, was Judge Halleek's wife...

...The second comment came from David Austern, a defense lawyer in Ronald Goldfarb’s Washington law firm...

...And too much tax money going out...

...in which a girl who has been shot in the back must hide from her attackers because the suspects were freed after being caught...

...A year before the bill passed in Congress, Ronald Goldfarb, a frequent contributor on criminal matters to the Post’s editorial page, had written an article for the Post in which he perceived the neceisity for preventive detention...

...I thought about it briefly and declined...

...I knew right away they were going to fire it because you just don’t cock a gun without a reason,’ Morris said...

...It would inspire new disrespect for the law and seriously interfere with the major function of the courts, which is the administration of justice...

...He later gave a detailed confession...

...Lee Cross ran a finger through her hair and absently glanced at a strand for a second...

...Parts of these editorials today have an irony all their own: “The District of Columbia crime bill is political legislation with a vengeance...

...But in another office I found out that Raymond Boswell had been caught, once again, and his case was now available for study in Judge Charles Halleck’s chambers, where it was soon coming up for a hearing (although Halleck had not been responsible for the earlier disposition of the case...

...Eunice Walker, an alleged accomplice, was listed as living on A Street, S. E., for “three weeks...

...You know what they could do to cut down on the backlog...

...I ~ ~ Liberal Aspirations I set off for the library, to find out about the circumstances surrounding the passage of the Bail Reform Act...

...But often the judge doesn’t, He’ll say, ‘Let’s see what happens in this case first.’ He’s not been proven guilty yet, you see...

...As a result of these interviews, a total of 3,500 suspects had been released on recognizance by judges, who in those cases were following the Vera Foundation’s recommendation...

...Today, Goldfarb says he has almost given up trying to persuade the “civil libertarians” on this point...

...I might have been less confident had I been reading The Washington Post or Star in recent months...

...She was surprised to see that the judges routinely denied any form of bail to suspects who, in D.C., would routinely be released on recognizance...

...Crime was going up, up, up, I would have read...

...That is 25 per cent of the cases...

...I Knew They Were Going to Fire’ When a criminal suspect is arrested in Washington, D. C., one of several courses of action may be followed: the accused may be released on his personal recognizance (this is by far the most common outcome), or the judge may require him to post bond, which can be of two types-cash or surety...

...The rest they couldn’t care less about...

...Out on probation, he’s arrested again for armed robbery...

...We took our strongest case and held them on that charge...

...Austern accompanied a British magistrate to a preventive detention hearing for a D. C. defendant charged with a violent crime...

...The newspaper discerned a “deeply troubling question” as a result of this murder and the subsequent pretrial release of the suspect, wherein both the judge and the prosecutor had seen “following the law, literally and explicitly...

...You can’t expect the victim to believe it when he knows the person who robbed him...

...And after a very few years the soft clay hardens, his nature is “set...

...Why shouldn’t the latter outweigh the former...

...Since then, adult sentences have been occasionally imposed on youthful offenders...

...According to the modern view, man is an almost infinitely malleable entity, plastic in his make-up, capable of being warped, bent, distorted, but capable also of being straightened out again...

...Similarly, the decriminalizing reforms urged by Judge Halleck have plenty to recommend them, especially the shorter interval between arrest and trial that would result because of the smaller caseload, and the savings in police man-hours...

...Then the Supreme Court finally ruled that the judge can use his discretion about applying the Youth Act in sentencing...

...What happens...

...Chapin read out about ten such cases, and I then went down to the Bench Warrant section and requested to see the jackets on these cases...

...They keep flooding the court system...

...She lit another cigarette and went on: “The citizens don’t understand, either, especially the ones who are poor but honest...

...He raped and murdered her...

...Misdemeanor offenders, of course, are not likely to get themselves into the more serious trouble of violating parole conditions...

...As they passed the couple, one of the men pulled out a gun, cocked it and stuck it in Sally Morris’ back...

...It was debated in Congress in 1965, at a time when the aspirations of liberalism in America were perhaps at an all-time high...

...pretrial detention” would be an improvement...

...Okay, in July 1974 he was rearrested on first-degree burglary...

...And they keep indicting them,” Halleck went on, his voice rising...

...When you consider that we convict 75 per cent of those indicted, and that about 75 per cknt of those indicted are on the streets before trial, you’ve got a lot of dangerous people on the streets of D. C.” About 3,000 defendants are free on bond on any given day in D. C., about 2,250 of whom are statistically likely to be found guilty...

...The part of the Grand ’ Jury section I saw had rooms where policemen were sitting playing cards, waiting to testify...

...perhaps society can “bend” him, but only within narrow limits...

...But you could look up the ‘jacket’ in the Bench Warrant section...

...Bond was $10,000, but the defendant had made bond...

...Lee Cross sat behind her desk, which was laden with files...

...But a recent study has shown that over a third of Bonabond’s clients either fail to appear for trial or are rearrested for another crime before they appear in court...

...Today a comparable conversation at a Tbashington dinner party would no doubt focus on his underprivileged upbringing...

...McCulloch: I would say that is a reasonably accurate generalization...

...Here, let me get you a book,” he said, darting off to an inner room...

...defense attorneys who occasionally strolled from room to room (generally they wore three-piece suits of an elegant cut...

...not for “life,” but until the burning adrenalin of youth has stopped flowing so hotly...

...Could that be right...

...It was a pleasant evening and I felt like walking...

...or selling half-a-pint out of your back door-not dangerous...

...Studies have shown that...

...But the fantasy of social workers notwithstanding, a multiple armed robber is not just some put-upon victim of society, but a very likely incorrigible menace to society who should be dealt with accordingly...

...That’s just like writing ‘pigeon’ right on your forehead...

...I read about it two days later in the Post: “A minister’s son, who came to Washington in July after his college graduation to work as a draftsman for Amtrak, was fatally stabbed Friday night, D. C. police said, as he walked along P Street N. W. near the bridge across Rock Creek Park...

...The defendants don’t get proper notice, or they say they never received it...

...And so, in the early and mid-l960s, there was a build-up of such sentiments in America, although they had appeared earlier, in the 193Os, and were familiar, of course, to readers of Dickens and Victor Hugo...

...One more point before you go,” she said...

...That seemed odd, too...

...certainly it is at odds with the traditional conception of man...

...A perfect cause to champion...

...The bail system, as it has operated in federal and state courts for generations, is fundamentally undemocratic and unjust,” said the Times...

...The judge knew that they were suspects in the other case, but he has to consider their record of convictions, their ties to the community, their employment record, and so on, in determining their bond...

...And the Bail Agency could not verify his address...

...You should be up there on the Hill talking to congressmen if you want to change the system...

...Since 1966, the FBI’s Index of Crimes (i...

...to realize that a man who has pleaded guilty to between 500 and 1,000 rapes should not be offered a “deal” of total immunity from prosecution, an actual case that was recently reported in Prince George’s County, Maryland...

...But even those who regard it as excessively bleak, who believe in the possibility of rehabilitation, must concede that society has not yet found the way to change a violent criminal into a peaceful citizen...

...That sounds fanciful, but that is precisely what the District of Columbia crime bill symbolizes to black critics: a model for state and national legislation to make the country ‘safe’ by putting dangerous people, mostly blacks, in jail without trial...

...Why this particular case...

...But crime was increasing at about the same rate as in the rest of the nation...

...Here’s the wording,” Lee Cross said, showing me the D. C. Code...

...or ‘he was already out on pretrial release.’ So I have a standard little speech I give them...

...It is also extremely modern...

...I’m convinced that the big unanswered question in all this is witness intimidation,’’ she said...

...He’ll know you refused to identify him...

...There are now such things as ‘witness protection units,’ used primarily for organized crime cases, but sometimes with street crime...

...She got 1,500 bucks out of it passing bad checks, and she isn’t going to jail...

...But with each innovation, it .seemed, there were ten more rapes, a dozen more armed robberies, several more murders, and a rash of muggings...

...These were only practical shortcomings...

...sleeve, but the judge seemed not to notice...

...A Washington Post editorial soon followed, making three recommendations: “First of all, the District of Columbia needs legislation to compensate the victims...

...And then they did a very good job of selling it to their liberal friends in Congress...

...Many of them refuse to come down here to the Grand Jury and testify...

...According to this view, he is born naturally into a state of innocence, but made of a soft and fragile substance, so that an evil society can easily twist him away from goodness...

...A blue-collar worker...

...According to one figure I had read, preventive detention has been applied only 50 times since it went into effect in 1971...

...But for most of the people we get, these considerations don’t bother them at all...

...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...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...

...or actually committed one, at some point...

...I’ll tell you a story about him, He was trying a firstdegree murder case also involving a rape...

...Roy Weeks was listed as living on 10th Street, N. W., and as having resided there for “three months, with girl friend...

...I’m here till seven at night, trying to get caught up...

...But the armed robber does not get probation, and the man charged with armed robbery should be held “preventively...

...Auto thefts alone were down, and that was because manufacturers had figured out how to make the new models practically burglar-proof...

...Now I was told I wasn’t allowed to see them, according to chief deputy clerk Frederick Beane, because I was a reporter, not a lawyer...

...In his Life ofJohnson, Boswell reports dinner conversation in London about whether it is right to shoot a highwayman on sight or to hang him later...

...He came back ,with two: Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins’ The Honest Politician3 Guide to Crime Control, in which the judge had underlined a proposal to de-criminalize a number of “victimless” crimes (drunkenness, gambling, drug abuse, abortion by a qualified medical practitioner, sexual behavior between consenting adults), and Alice In Wonderland...

...The parole board meanwhile required his arrest for violations of his earlier parole...

...Since he had no previous record under the fake name, he was released on his personal recognizance in that case...

...There are 4,586 police officers in the District of Columbia, costing each resident an average of $124 per year-double the national average...

...Her boyfriend came to see her during his lunch hour, and he brought a friend with him...

...S. v. Olen Lebby-which is a case study in lenient justice...

...Also, there is clearly no need to lock up the defendant charged with nonviolent crimes: Oliver Twist gets paroled, to quell liberal fears on that point...

...A crime is committed, right...

...There were only 30 persons rearrested of the 3,500 released on recognizance in the Manhattan Bail Roject...

...In fact, this turned out to be the Post’s second recommendation...

...The story went on: “It was about 10:30 p. m., she recalled...

...It was easy, from the example of Gideon, to form the impression that criminals in America were in many instances true-life versions of characters in Dickens-wonderful people, really, but sorely mistreated by society and, more often than not, sent off to prison or the workhouse for nothing more serious than stealing a loaf of bread...

...Duncan McCrea, 21, died shortly after 11 p. m. of a single stab wound in the chest, according to the D. C. medical examiner’s office...

...As for the Bail Reform Act, the D. C. Code, Section 1321 , discusses release prior to trial...

...hello, what’s this...

...In some cases it’s overt intimidation-a phone call from the defendant-but more often just a feeling because they saw the guy back on the street...

...Then, pending sentence, he was released by the judge on condition that he take a certain job which the judge had arranged for him...

...The prosecutors for local or “street” crime, as well as federal crime, are U. S. attorneys...

...I say we have a very good case...

...Why is it, I asked myself, that the rights of criminal suspects must balance the rights of those not suspected of crimes...

...And who was the unnamed “girl friend...

...Witnesses may come down here four, five, or six times...

...He had several prior convictions, including rape, unauthorized use of a vehicle, rape reduced to simple assault, and an escape in 1971...

...First of all...

...The explanation for this discrepancy is that, in making recommendations for release, the Vera Foundation excluded first of all the most serious categories of crime from consider at ion : homicides, sex crimes, and drug addiction cases...

...Vera Foundation personnel had been allowed to interview arrested suspects in Manhattan over a three-year period...

...nickel bags of marijuana-not dangerous...

...But the court released the defendant on $1,000 surety, which meant he had to pay $100, and he then failed to appear for all three charges...