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yf i | f ae i rd a No. 606.—OcrToBerR On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. {March 31, 1970] State of Illinois, Petitioner, v. William Allen. Mr. Justice Dovc.as, I agree with the Court that a criminal trial, in the constitutional sense, cannot take place where the court- room is a bedlam and either the accused or the judge is hurling epithets at the other. A courtroom is 4 hallowed place where trials must proceed with dignity and not become occasions for entertainment by the par- ticipants, by exiraneous persons, by modern mass media or otherwise. My difficulty is not with the basic hypothesis of this decision, but with the use of this case to establish the appropriate guidelines for judicial control. This is a state case, the trial having taken place nearly 13 years ago. That elapse of time is not necessarily a barrier to a challenge of the constitutionality of a crim- inal conviction. But in this case it should be. There is more than an intimation.in the present record that the defendant was a mental case. The passage of time since 1957, the date of the trial, makes it, how- ever, impossible to determine what the mental condi- tion of the defendant was at that time. The fact that a defendant has been found to understand “the nature and object of the proceedings against him” and thus competent to stand trial' does not answer the difficult questions as to what a trial judge should do with an otherwise mentally ill defendant who creates a court- 1 See n. 5, infra.