-Caveat Lector-
U.S. Slowly Drifting Toward a Police State
Carl Rowan
W ASHINGTON--There is bitter, bitter irony in the fact that even as Americans
expressed their outrage over sickening police abuse in Los Angeles, an
angrily divided U.S. Supreme Court would give cops and other state agents a
green light to violate the constitutional rights of suspects.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist was joined by four other conservatives in
declaring that a coerced confession is not automatically a reason to throw
out a criminal conviction--that sometimes a tainted confession may-be
disregarded as merely harmless error',
For the first time in eight years, Justice Byron White read from the bench a
four-member dissent in which he said the majority had dislodged one of the
fundamental tenets of our criminal justice system that the state may not use
inquisitorial tactics to bludgeon confessions out of criminal suspects.
This 5-4 decision that jeopardizes basic human rights is as worrisome as
anything to come out of the Supreme Court in my four decades of watching that
tribunal.
The shining difference between this country and most others is that even in
our years of greatest fear and paranoia we have not tolerated anything close
to Hitter's Gestapo or Stalin's KGB.
We have protected fiercely the constitutional protections against
unreasonable search and seizure, the right of a suspect to have counsel,
every citizen's right to refuse to give self-incriminating evidence.
But in recent years, partly because of demagoguery from the White House, or
politicians, seeking the White House, the general US. mood has embraced the
idea, To hell with the Constitution; let's do anything that needs to be done
to combat crime.
Ronald Reagan ran on a law 'n' order platform; George Bush ran against
rapist-killer Willie Horton. They won, thus sending hundreds of Democrats and
liberal Republicans scurrying for ways to prove that they hate crime more
than they love constitutional protections.
What is worse is that Reagan and Bush have packed the Supreme Court, the
appeals and federal district courts, with justices and judges who believe
that the Constitution must be suspended occasionally in order to loch up the
criminal.
The mood in much of the United States now is that there's nothing wrong with
delivering a few fists to the belly, a rubber hose to the head and neck, a
few electric shocks to the genitals, it they make someone confess to some
awful crime.
The cops in Las Angeles who were captured on videotape beating Rodney Glenn
King so mercilessly that President Bush called it sickening were aware of
this American mindset They, like some police officers in every city, assumed
that the White House, the justices and judges, the newspaper editors, would
be on their side. After all, they were getting tough on crime, and what
law-abiding politician would complain just because the cops had declared
themselves arrester, indicter, judge and punished?
This assert/on that coerced confessions may be mere harmless errors will be
accepted by millions of Americans who assume that they personally will never
be the victims of police statism. They assumeâand are for the most part
correctâthat the people who will be coerced are the poor who can't hire good
lawyers, the lower class whites who have no political clout, the racial
minorities who have neither money nor social status nor meaningful political
power.
But the histories of Nazi Germany, of Stalin's Russia, of postwar Eastern
Europe, or pre- and postwar China show that once a police state gets its
grip, no class or kind of people remains invulnerable to the oppressions and
repressions of those in power.
The judicial outrages we are now seeing will be the most lasting of the
legacies of Ronald Reagan.
The people and the politicians asked for this lurch toward a police state.
Only the people and the politicians can reverse the trend.
Carl Rowan is a columnist based in Washington, D.C.
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