All in a Day's Work

The curtains parted for the last time this term, and out came the U.S. Supreme Court justices to air in public no less than 39 interpretations of 17 cases before them. That was enough to make their record secure: they clinched the alltime record for dissents in one term--264 in an eight-month calendar of 151 cases. With that, they adjourned for the summer to ride off in all directions, just as they had been doing all through the session.

Three of their final day's opinions would be argued by lawyers for years to come.

Illegal Search. In one 6-to-3 decision, the court muddied up the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Americans safety from "unreasonable searches and seizures." The court had often bent over backwards to bar the use of evidence seized illegally (i.e., without search warrants, or by wire tapping) from federal trials. But last week the majority upheld a Colorado state court which had convicted a Denver physician of performing an abortion on evidence obtained without a warrant.

Illegal evidence could be legally introduced in state trials, said the majority, in any state whose laws do not specifically outlaw it. If words mean what they say (a proviso that Justice Felix Frankfurter has sometimes disputed), the majority seemed to be saying that the protection of the Fourth Amendment does not extend to all citizens. The decision left 30 of the 48 states free to use the evidence that has to be tossed out of all federal courts. To compound the confusion, Justice Frankfurter added one more helpful remark to the majority opinion: if a state passes a law to legalize searches which are already legal in fact, the Supreme Court may have to declare it unconstitutional.

Following the Flag. In a belated--and reluctant--opinion which sided with a six-month-old majority decision, Justice Willam 0. Douglas raised a conscience-pricking doubt about the legality of the Allies' punishment of Axis war criminals. When seven of the 25 Japanese warlords convicted in Tokyo appealed to the Supreme Court last year, the court decided it had no power to upset the judgment of the international tribunal which tried them. Now Douglas wanted to know: if the Supreme Court can't scrutinize the tribunals' judgments, who can? "If an American general holds a prisoner, our process can reach him wherever he is," he wrote. "To that extent, at least, the Constitution follows the flag. It is no defense for him to say he acts for the Allied powers." To cope with the dilemma, Douglas evolved a novel formula: the Japanese now serving war-crimes sentences should bring suit in lower U.S. courts against their American jailers (and those who command the jailers) to determine whether they have been imprisoned illegally. ' Naturally, the proposal was of no help to the seven Japanese executed for their war crimes. Two of them were among those who laid the issue before the court.

Lying in Company. The court's most astonishing decision of the day was the setting aside of the perjury conviction of deposed Labor Leader Harold R. Christoffel, who ran the costly Allis Chalmers strike in 1941. Christoffel had been given a two-to six-year prison sentence for falsely telling the House Education and Labor Committee that he was not a Communist. The Supreme Court, split 5 to 4, rescued Christoffel with a startling technicality: a quorum of the committee was not on hand when he told his lies; therefore, though he lied under oath, he had not lied before a competent tribunal.

Justice Robert H. Jackson could hardly contain himself in his dissent from Justice Frank Murphy's majority opinion. The court was trying to change Congress' own rules, he said. For more than 150 years it has been standard congressional practice to presume a quorum until someone specifically raised the question and proved otherwise (as no one did in the Christoffel case). Murphy's decision, said Jackson, challenged the validity of thousands of congressional bills which have been passed without a record vote--hence without actual proof that a quorum was on hand.

Pennsylvania's Congressman Francis Walter promptly began drafting a bill to provide what had always been assumed before: that Congress can run its business the way it pleases. Supreme Court decisions, groused Walter, echoing a former justice, are getting to be "like excursion tickets--good for one day only."

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