The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 26

6-C THI NASHVILLE TENNESSIAN. Sunday. 1. 1971 "A prison is part of the temple of justice. Raymond Lavon found it to be a dark pit where his dreams and finally his life were Red Queen Knows Gotham ONE OF THE unjust features of the system is bail.

Judges offer only about 10 trial, which could paralyze New York's creaking court system that's already disposing of fewer cases each year. Stevens H. Clarke of the New York City Criminal Justice Inormtion Bmvau Justice SI Lv if 7fPa Warn ill MiillB Air mmmm A Fiction avoided if substantive wants the courts to go into emergency session on nights and weekends to clear up an estimated backlog of mere than 500,000 cases pending in the criminal and supreme courts. THE BACKLOG, which indicates the courts are almost two years behind in their work, is the result of too few judges, too many judges who hold court only a few hours a day and often not at all in summer, and the resort to repeated adjournments (continuances) by defendants to gain advantages. The average defendant who comes to trial already has made six court appearances before almost as many judges.

Many adjournments are patently necessary because lawyers, witnesses, and even prosecutors fail to show up. Often, no record can be found of what transpired at a previous hearing. A questionable by-product of the deteriorating court situation is the bargaining of pleas, by which serious charges against felons are dropped so that they can plead guilty to misdemeanors with lesser sentences. Thus time-consuming, expensive trials are avoided. The practice has grown so common here and in many other parts of the United States that it seems indispensable.

About 90 of convictions are obtained by bargaining in New York City. YET, IN upholding the prac of defendants remanded to jail the authorized option to secure bail by depositing a small cash aaernative, nine-tenths of which is returned to the defendant when he appears in court. Only 20 of those remanded ever receive bail reduction, although records show that half of those who do make bail in 24 hours. "Court rules should require a periodic re-valuation at courthouses of bail for each remanded defendant," says Lindsay. "In addition, judges should make periodic visits to detention centers to hear in person those prisoners with serious bail grievances.

Besides the enormous effect upon prisoner and correction officer morale, this would enable each judge to become familiar with prison conditions." A FEW RECENT developments herald long-due reform. The Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit group which seeks improvement of criminal justice, has worked out a witness control system which makes adjournment less appealing to the defense. It has worked successfully in the Bronx. This month, the appellate division ordered state supreme court justices to crack down on lawyers who seek adjournments as a defense tactic. In Queens, the Legal Aid Society has organized faster of cases by reducing the number of judges before whom defendants are brought in pretrial hearings.

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP NEW YORK (UPI) The Red Queen in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' had her own perverse brand of justice: First the punishment. Then the Vial. It happens all the time in New York City. The constitutional right to speedy trial is a fiction for a vast majority of defendants who cannot afford a good, well-connected attorney.

believes nearly 150 new judges, each with a staff of 12, are needed now to reduce the case load per judge to what it was 10 years Some idea of how much time is given to court cases at present is offered by Asst. Dist. Atty. Alan Frazer. Frazer considers a normal caseload 300 cases a day.

He has handled- as many as 30 cases in the courtroom in an hour. On a busy day, he said, a judge will spend no more than two minutes on any pretrial hearing (the official estimate in arraignment court is 1.7 minutes). SOMETIMES defense attorney's barely have time to get in a word, and ot-en have not met their clients yet. Most district attorneys have no prior knowledge of the case either. It is not surprising that a great many cases simply get lost.

It is difficult to get statistics on cases in which bench warrants have been issued but never executed, but it probably runs between 15,000 and 20,000 a year. This means a defendant does not appear on a summons or violates bail or pretrial parole. New York is notoriously lax about prosecuting bail violators. "Unable to locate cases rarely return to court," said Clarke. "When they do, it is usually because the defendant is arrested on a new charge and the outstanding warrant AP Wire photo via eabl from London Checking 'Ya, Mote! HASTINGS, England Robert Byrne of the United States, seated left, and Britain's Raymond Keene sit on the snow-covered waterfront, practicing for their matches in the 46th International Chess Congress.

Watching them is Nikolai Krogius of the Soviet Union. psychiatric help were available, but it is not. Troublemakers are dealt the outmoded punishment weeks, often months i solitary confinement. Psychia-tris's say such treatment is guaranteed to deepen any mental disturbances that may exist in a prisoner. More usually, restive defendants are fed tranquilizers until they become completely disoriented.

Such was the case of Raymond Lavon, according to Board of Correction Chairman William J. Vanden Heuvel. Lavon hanged himself in his cell Nov. 3 after 10 months imprisonment and 24 separate pretrial court appearances in connection with an assault charge. THE FRUSTRATION endless pretrial trips to court, declining health, lack physical or psychiatric examinations, continuous "medication" with drugs, and finally the awful loneliness of solitary confinement led Lavon to the ultimate act of dispair at the age of 25, according to Vanden Heuvel.

"A prison is part of the French police said it was the biggest single cache of morphine base in France. Six men, apparently from the same gang, were arrested last June in Marseille and Milan 1st Step a Dilly LONDON (UPI) A British European Airways A flight from Dublin to London was diverted to Manchester when a warning light in the cockpit indicated someone was trying to open a cabin door. A check at Manchester revealed a passenger had mistaken a cabin emergency exit for the door to the washroom. The plane later continued to London. Border Police Find Morphine Base MENTON, France (AP) A suspicious policeman ordered a search of a car arriving at the Italian-French border from Beirut and uncovered 139 kilograms of morphine base, French police announced.

The morphine base, processed into heroin, would have a retail market value of about $2.5 million in New York. tice by a 6-3 vote last Nov. 23, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that it hoped the states "in their wisdom" might wish to eliminate pleas bargaining. Then a person charged with a crime would' either plead guilty or stand Eventually "omnibus court hearings which would wrap arraignment and pretrial procedure into one courtroom appearance are expected to be tried experimentally.

is discovered; this can happen only if the previous charge was fingerprintable." FOR THOSE who cannot make bail and they are often black and Puerto Rican the average length of detention before trial is 5.14 months in State Supreme Court cases and 1.77 months in Criminal Court cases. About 43 of those held in detention until trial spend more than a year in jail a figure all the more in light of the fact that 55 of all arrests result in dismissals and verdicts of not guilty. The parallel to the Red Queen's justice is the punishment of being imprisoned in the city's decrepit houses of detention which are filled to 183 of capacity. New facilities scheduled to open in 1971 and 1972 will accommodate 2,500 prisoners but will not ease conditions for some 50 of those imprisoned. RIOTS AT four houses of detention in 1970 mainly protests over inhuman conditions caused $2 million worth of damage.

Three young prisoners committed suicide in a three-week period last fall. Their deaths might have been temple of justice," Vanden Heuvel reported to Mayor John V. Lindsay after an investigation of. the case. "Raymond Lavon found it to be a dark pit where his dreams and finally his life were lost." Lindsay sees court delays as "the keystone in the crisis Use your IiurkJiardt cliarge, your JiankAmericard, Master Charge, SuperCard or American Express card.

of criminal justice." He is urging a 60-day limit on pretrial detention. He claims this would reduce the current jailhouse population by 46. In the meantime, Lindsay Sport Coats Our Dorchester brand all-wool and Dacron and wool sport coats in plaids, checks and tweeds. Two- and three-buttori styling. ffipu ana voo.

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$25, $27.50 $30. at Santa Barbara in 1970, compared to none the previous year. The crime rate at Colorado State University is double last year's with $10,000 in property stolen in November alone. Rutgers reported one armed robbery in 1969 and 13 so far last year. At Harvard, where officials began keeping figures this fall, more than $18,000 in property was stolen from the freshman dormitories between the opening of the school year in September and Nov.

9. DURING THE Stanford-Purdue football game Oct. 2, thieves took almost $3,000 in clothes, radios and stereo tape players from several rooms and cars on the Palo Alto campus. Reported theft losses there last year totaled $117,757 more than 10 times the 1965 figure. 19 HJKKItt AMD TP Twice-Yearly CLEARANCE SALE 1 ul ftmi I ll Here at South Carolina, security costs almost $30 a vear for each of the 15,000 Many Outstanding Values: By ANDREW H.

MALCOLM Th New York Timoi Nwt Servico COLUMBIA, S.C. Until last fall, Libby Honeycutt, 21, a senior at the University of South Carolina, walked to the library in the evenings without a worry. Not any more. There have been three rapes and several other assaults on campus since September. Now when Miss Honeycutt goes out at night, she telephones for an escort.

An Alpha Phi Omega Fraternity member, working in a new security program, drives her to her campus destination in a university car. THE UNIVERSITY of South Carolina is not alone in its concern with crime. At many colleges and universities across the country in the past year there appears to have been an increase in campus crime. Administrators are responding often at student urging with new security measures. Many campus security forces have rapidly grown into sizable, well equipped police departments.

Administrators and informed security officials believe crme on the nation's 3,000 college and university campuses is on the rise. They generally attribute the apparent increase to the growth of crime in adjacent communities, to larger student populations, to society's general permissiveness and to better statistical records. THESE authorities believe nonstudents are involved in most cases on urban campuses. In New York City, for example, arrest records show a majority of serious crimes in city universities are committed by outsiders who find university buildings rich preserves on which to prey. At the University of Arizona, Robert L.

Houston, a vice president, said: "Twenty years ago our biggest problem on campus was a panty ra'd." But this year, he noted, there have been 18 assaults on students. AFTER SEVERAL such Suits students. Thirty-seven policemen (three times the 1968 force) patrol the 206-acre urban campus, each packing a 38-caIiber Colt. Even so, Miss Honeycutt said, "I just never go out alone at night anymore. The girls are just too scared." Instead, as posters throughout the women's dormitories urge, she and perhaps 60 or 75 other women nightly use Alpha Phi Omega's free car service.

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During the 12 months ending last June 30, he reported, $60,289 in property was stolen on campus. Only $8,641 worth was recovered. The university recently spent $200,003 to illuminate some dark areas, to fence in othprs and to clear trees and shrubs that formed excellent hiding places for would be attackers. Two university buses provide nightly transportation, and coeds may park after i orig. 115.

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assaults at Rutgers University, a group of students in November disrupted a board of governojs meeting and staged a sit-in at a dean's office to demand additional ecurity. There have been five rapes jU the University of California dark in no-parking zones that are closer to their rooms than the lots. Many women take self-defense courses, while others carry sharpened nail files or small cans of irritant spray for protection..