World News
Vol. 75, No. 52
Eugene, Oregon
Monday, October 22, 1973
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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.