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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 22, 1973)
World News Vol. 75, No. 52 Eugene, Oregon Monday, October 22, 1973 DO you -SoMe THIfiJG) ° b 'Q-h MFTs VWU A<=/Vkj' bay A-3UJFK6HE: COURT £ku_ mii. Het-P ~7 ° "the Coot rf" ® CCHPLMtJTS TAK€<J «€*£ \/1 Cftfm. I-L Mideast cease-fire proposed in UN UNITED NATIONS (UPI) — The U.N. Security Council early Monday accepted a joint U.S.-Soviet Middle East peace resolution calling for an “in-place” cease-fire within 12 hours of the measure’s passage. The vote was 14-0. China, objecting that the “two super-powers” sought to push through a measure maintaining a “no peace-no war” situation in the Middle East, refused to participate in the vote. Israel accepted the cease-fire call, with reser vations. Egypt, while affirming the right to maintain its territorial integrity and the inadmissibility of acquisition of land by conquest, did not express clearly whether it was in favor of the cease-fire. The proposal called for implementation of the Nov. 22,1967 U.N. Security Council resolution which directed, in wofds whose exact meaning has long been disputed, that Israel withdraw from Arab lands seized in the 1967 Middle East War. The joint U.S.-Soviet proposal was put before an emergency meeting of the Security Council convened at 10:17 p.m. EDT. It had been worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who flew to the Kremlin to confer with Soviet officials. Concurrently with the ceasefire, according to the resolution, Israel and the Arabs should start negotiations “under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” In military developments, Israel said Sunday it had widened its bridgehead inside Egypt to nearly 500 square miles in an all-day battle involving tanks, artillery and planes and that its forces were 45 miles from Cairo. But Egypt said Israel “will never be able to reach Cairo.” A Syrian military spokesman early Monday reported all night heavy fighting at Mt. Hermon in the Golan Heights between Syrian troops and helicopter borne Israelis. The first wave of Israeli troops landed from helicopters, in the region at 3 p.m. Sunday, and was “destroyed by our forces” in heavy fighting, the spokesman said. Legal Liberals circumvent Supreme Court conservatism By LINDA MATHEWS (C) 1973, The Los Anglees Times WASHINGTON—The legal niceties probably make no difference to Joe Bell, a young Mississippi Black man now doing time at the state prison farm. But if it’s any comfort to anyone else, a 10-year-old decision of the United States Supreme Court says he shouldn’t be in jail. There are two reasons Joe Bell is locked up, rather than walking the streets of Rolling Fork, his hometown. The first is that the Mississippi Supreme Court, when it reviewed his case a few months ago, chose to ignore the United States Supreme Court. The second is that his lawyers chose not to appeal. “It took a long time for us to decide not to take the Bell case to the Supreme Court,” David Tatel, one of his attorneys, said recently. “We consulted several criminal law experts. Finally we concluded that there wasn’t much chance of winning his particular case—and there was a very great chance we could do substantial harm.” The substantial harm Tatel feared was a ruling from the Supreme Court, now increasingly hostile to the rights of criminal defendants, reversing its own 10-year-old, pro-defendant precedent called Wong Sun vs. United States that applied to Bell’s case. “We chose not to give the Court an opportunity to overrule Wong Sun,” Tatel said, “because we thought that defendants in other states still need it and get some use from it. It just isn’t the law in Mississippi any more.” Tatel isn’t the only lawyer in the country making such calculations these days and deciding, finally, not to take a case all the way to the Supreme Court. Many civil rights and civil liberties lawyers interested in law reform say that figuring out how to circumvent the Supreme Court has become central to their strategy. That is a switch for a court that was generally viewed, only five years ago, as the champion of criminal defendants, anti-war pickets, welfare mothers and every minority in the counrty. Now, the country’s leading law reformers see the high court as hostile to new legal approaches. A few think president Nixon’s four appointees are so deter mined to stop the trends set in motion by the Warren court that they will reverse the landmark decisions of the 1960s, given the chance. Whether that perception is accurate or not, it shows in the Court’s docket. The justices will have plenty of important, far-reaching cases to decide this year, but the cases that are not before them are almost as remarkable as those that are. Similarly, the high court has agreed to hear several challenges to state laws that keeep minority parties off the ballot and prevent jail inmates from voting. But a potentially more important case, in which Pennsylvania voters argued unsuccessfully that they should not be purged from the registration lists merely because they had not voted in previous general elections, won’t be appealed. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law thought they had no chance. “Sometimes it’s better to live with an unfavorable decision in a lower court than take the case to the Supreme Court,” explains Tatel, director of the Lawyers Committee. “If you lose in the Supreme Court, you set a bad precedent that applies nation-wide and can stop a whole reform movement in its tracks.” The law reformers are the first to admit that they have lost a lot of big ones lately.Law isn’t exactly like baseball, but the organizations that do calculate their batting averages in the Supreme Court report a slump. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, won 90 per cent of its cases in 1968-69, the last year Chief Justice Earl Warren sat. In 1972-73 its win rate had slipped to 42 per cent. And, in some areas, the reformers batted so low that they prefer to sit out the next few terms. “It’s hard for me to conjure up a search and seizure case, or a con fession case, that I could win,” said one criminal lawyer. It was this very consideration that convinced the lawyers committee not to appeal Bell’s case. “Even though we knew he hadn’t a chance, it was one of the hardest decisions any of us had ever made,” Tatel explained, “primarily because it was a criminal case. There was more than a legal principle at stake; the guy.faced two and a half years in prison.” The Supreme Court precedent that the Lawyers Committee chose to preserve—the Wong Sun case—was handed down in the heyday of the Warren court. It (Continued on Page 8) In this issue The firing of Archibald Cox has further tangled the already overgrown political jungle. Dan Sheahon is your guide in exploring the legal thicket. Pop art is getting bigger and bigger—literally. One man, Yugoslav artist Christo, has this particular branch of expression all wrapped up—also literally. If you always wanted to know why this country is so American, a look at industry (wine making) here and abroad may be either enlightening or revolting. The Oakland Athletics proved the odds-makera right Sunday, by downing the New York Meta in the seventh and deciding game of the World Series.
