◆ SpookStack

Hy Sarr. ~ PEMBERTON: The polygraph violates a person's right not to testify against him- self. He is coerced by the threat of pre- sumed guilt if he refuses to submit. LEIGHTON: TV’e’ve told crime has increased “five times faster than the population.” T suspect that such statistics are issued to terrorize rather than-inform the public, 2) te! 7 - N: Once aman has been informed of his rights to counsel and to remain silent, the police should be permitted to interrogate him exactly as they wish. we COOK: This runaway inereace in crime ( ,: BAYARD RUSTIN, executive director of ul A. Philip Randolph Instiune, an activise civil rights organization, has been an articulate, versatile fighter for racial equality ever since he was youth organ- izer of the 1941 Negro March on Wash- ington and: firse field secretary of the then newly organized Congress of Ra- cial Equality. In the course of an ener- getic and checkered career, he ha’ spent 28 months in a Federal penitentiary as a conscientious objector, led sit-ins at the British Embassy in Washington as chair- man of the Free India Committee, served 30 days in a chain gang for lead- ing a Freedom Ride through North Caro- lina, and helped Dr. Martin Luther hing organize the historic Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. In 1963 he was deputy director of the second March on Washington, and the following year he engineered the New York City school boycott. “His whole life,” in the words of one reporter, “has been spent in a confrontation with police power.” WILLIAM -TURNER, a former FBI agent and wire-tap expert, first came to public no- tice five years ago when he wrote to Sen- ate and House committces—while still employed by the Bureau—demanding an investigation of FBI disciplinary meas- ures, Immediately dismissed, he took to the air on both coasts to broadcast stinging criticisms of FBI policies and in- vestigative methods. Since then, he has become a writer on modern police-science techniques for the legal and criminol- ogy press, consulting editor for Police Science Library, and a free-lance con- tributor of general articles to major national §magazines—specializing, natu- rally enough, in investigative reportage. He is also writing a book, In Light and Shadow, about the boom in scientific crime-detection methods and their possi- ble threats to civil Hberties. ae PLAYBOY: Amid a mounting chorus of ominous warnings by law-enforcement agencies of a rampaging upsurge in crime ~—at a rate five times faster than the na- tional population growth, according to the FBI—the issue of “violence in the streets” has become both a tabloid catch phrase and a political football. Ignoring unequivocal statements by equally re- sponsible authorities that the number of violent crimes, far from increasing, has actually been cut in half during the past 30 years, many pundits, prosecutors and police officials have found a convenient Scapegoat in “bleeding-heart” judges— ring-led by the “liberals” on the U.S. Supreme Court—whose legal and hu- manitarian concern for the constitutional rights of the individual has resulted in a series of recent decisions decried by J. Edgar Hoover, among others, as a iudicial camoaien ta Ceaddle eviminale ‘witnessed in’ my years of law) enforce: ‘ment—an overzealous pity for the crim- cee oes 7: inal and an equivalent disregard for his victim.” Foremost among the historic Supreme Court decisions deplored by Hoover— and hailed by civil Nibertarians——are the Mapp. the McNabb-Mallory, the Gideon and the Escobedo cases, as they are popularly known. Briefly stated, the Mapp decision outlawed any use in state courts of evidence obtained by illegal house search without a warrant. In the Gideon case, the Court ruled that any- one accused of a serious offense, if un- able to afford a lawyer, has a right to court-appointed counsel. The McNabb and Mallory decisions disallowed the use of confessions in Federal trials whenever Federal officers fail to bring the suspect before a magistrate “without unnecessary delay’’ so that he can have a preliminary hearing upon the accusation made against him. And in the widely reported case of Escobedo ws. Illinois. the Court voided a Chicago laborer’s murder con- fession because police had refused to let him see his attorney before his interro- gation, even though the lawyer was in the station house at the time. Angry prosecutors have protested that almost nine out of ten convictions are based on a plea of guilty or some other form of confession. Disallowing confes- sions, they argue, will fatally shackle law- enforcement officers and remove the last restraints on a runaway crime wave. At loggerheads with this view are those who point to such cases as that of George Whitmore, Jr., a Negro trucker’s helper, convicted and jailed in New York City in 1964 for the murder of two girls on the strength of a six-page confession, who was later proved innocent when investigative work turned up the real murdcrer and proved Whituurc’s elab- orately detailed confession to be false: and that of the knife murderer of Kitty Genovese, who carried out his crime under the eyes of 38 witnesses in Kew Gardens, Long Iskind; he later em- barrassed police by confessing another murder to which they already held a con- fession from another man. Pondering how these false confessions were extracted in the first place, the public has not been reassured by declarations such as the one made last year to a Harper’s magazine re- porter by former New York City deputy police commissioner Richard Dougherw: “It is hardly news that suspects of serious crimes often get ‘worked over’ in the back rooms of station houses.” Who is right—the policeman who warns that we will soon be living under a rampant reign of criminal terror un- less his hands are untied, or the zealous civil libertarian who declares that the malian nen dee Me coe . anne, LC Se Sey Se ee i ee t t i