Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [366]
bv
Bram v. United States (1897) arose out of a trial for murder on the high seas. Bram was a ship’s officer accused of killing the captain, the captain’s wife, and the second mate. Bram was in custody in Halifax, Nova Scotia; he was stripped, searched, then questioned by detectives. They told him that another suspect, Brown, had seen him do the killings. Bram’s reaction was to say that Brown “could not see me” from where he was—a statement that was at least somewhat incriminating. At the trial, Bram’s lawyer struggled to keep this statement out of evidence but failed, and Bram was convicted. Bram appealed, and the Supreme Court reversed the conviction. The statement was tainted. If a person confessed, or made an incriminating statement, it had to be “wholly voluntary and in no manner influenced by the force of hope or fear.” Bram’s words did not meet this test.10
bw
The Supreme Court decision did not end the matter, which dragged on for over a decade—the local officials stonewalled and kept retrying the defendants; the Alabama Supreme Court invariably affirmed the convictions.17
bx
Miranda’s life ended with irony. In 1976, when he was thirty-four, Miranda got into a fight with two illegal immigrants. One of them stabbed him twice, and he died on the way to the hospital. The killer escaped, but the other man was caught. The Phoenix police, as they arrested this man, dutifully read him the Miranda warning, in both Spanish and English: “You have the right to remain silent.... You have the right to the presence of an attorney. . . . Do you understand these rights?”25
by
Most who were returned to prison for parole violations were in fact accused of crime, suspected of crime, or arrested of a crime, rather than one of the minor offenses. And no doubt many of them were guilty of the crime they were charged with. But the process was quick and summary, lacking in due process.
bz
The Court also felt that the punishment not only failed to fit the crime, but failed to “fit the criminal.” Lynch was not “an exhibitionist” who “forced himself on large numbers of the public by cavorting naked on a busy street at high noon.” The violation was fairly technical; it was not 100 percent clear that Lynch actually intended to expose himself to the carhop.42
ca
For example, in 1957, Robert Nathan Foss was convicted of possession of heroin.43 Fourteen years later, he was convicted again, this time of selling heroin. For a second conviction in a narcotics case, Foss received a punishment of ten years to life; that is, he was not eligible for parole until ten years were up. This, too, was declared cruel and unusual.
cb
In some states, too, legislatures created modest programs of compensation for victims. California passed a law in 1965 providing for aid, in case of “need,” to “the family of any person killed” or to the victim and his family if “incapacitated as the result of a crime of violence.”50 The statute also provided that the defendant could be ordered to pay a fine “commensurate in amount with the offense committed,” to go into the state’s fund for aid payments. But no fine was to be imposed if “such action will cause the family of the defendant to be dependent on public welfare.” In the following years, almost every state passed some sort of compensation law, almost always similarly modest. The federal government established its own program for federal crimes in 1984.51 These programs rested, of course, on a much different cultural base than the “victims’ rights” laws. They were part of the general expectation of justice so pervasive in contemporary American law, to the effect that compensation ought to be forthcoming from some source for every calamity.52
cc
In Johnson v. Avery,78 the Court voided a prison regulation that did not allow prisoners to help each other prepare writs of habeas corpus and other legal documents.
cd
Anarchy probably had been the rule in some local jails for a considerable