"Murder One"

THE MUGGING by MORTON HUNT 488 pages. Atheneum. $10.

Breathing hard, a shabby old man climbed two flights to his flat in a Bronx slum. As he turned the key, he heard behind him a sudden pummel of racing feet. When he began to shout, somebody struck him powerfully five times in the left side with a knife, and as he fell to the floor of his kitchen, a flesh-colored hearing aid popped out of his ear and landed close to his face.

The end of Alexander Helmer is the beginning of this remarkable study of crime and punishment in the U.S., 1964-72. The book has been minutely researched, gravely considered and artfully composed for maximum popular effect. To typify an era of ghetto violence, Author Morton Hunt (The Affair) aptly takes as his central instance the commonest of ghetto crimes, an actual attack performed by a gang of teenage drug addicts on Oct. 9, 1964.

Helmer's body was not discovered for nine days. There were no clues. But eventually a police informer fingers four young Puerto Ricans, three of them drug addicts and the fourth a juvenile sex offender. Later, the two detectives assigned to the case earnestly insist that the boys were merely "questioned." The boys just as earnestly insist that they were punched, kicked in the groin and stifled with ammonia-soaked rags.

Whatever happened, one night of it persuaded Alfredo Ortiz, 18, and Carlos Ortiz, 17, to sign confessions. Doel Valencia, 19, repudiated his statement in the morning. The actual killing, the confessions said, was done by Angel Walker. But Angel, a one-armed ex-boxer, was too smart to talk. A grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict him. The others spent five months in jail before their day in court. Author

Hunt describes the trial as a morose circus. The prosecutor is a plodding Percheron pitted against a couple of clownish counsels for the defense. One of them addresses the jury: "I leave thk with you, and I know that when you consider this case from all of its aspects every part of the statements, and the beatings, and the lack of will, and lack of intellect--do you think that these boys, lacking practically any education (that's another item to be considered by you)--I say that the resistance here was overcome by force!"

Carnival of Lies. The jury is a careful selection of incompetents and the testimony a carnival of lies. The accused lie. The police lie. Even the prosecutor lies indirectly by concealing vital evidence that favors the defendants. After two days of wrangling, the jury fails to reach a verdict. A year passes, twelve more expensive months in jail, and the defendants come to trial again. The new lawyers are a bit better, but the new judge is a lot worse. The jury sets Valencia free but convicts the Ortiz brothers of "Murder One" (first degree murder), a charge that carries a mandatory life sentence in New York State.

Miscarriage of justice? Not necessarily, in Hunt's opinion. Having exposed some of the makeweights in the scales of justice, he comes strongly to the defense of the U.S. legal system. "The worst thing about our system," he concludes, "is its dreadful inefficiency." The best thing? The idea that it is "better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man."

Hunt is less enthusiastic about the U.S. penal system. Even the best prisons, he says, "force the prisoner to be infantile and dependent." Nevertheless, in the most moving pages of the book, Hunt describes how life in prison helps Alfredo Ortiz to rescue the life he has practically lost. Alfredo, an undernourished runt who at 19 weighs 99 Ibs. and has a verbal IQ of 85, enrolls in prison school and pulls himself up in only a year from fifth-grade level to a high school diploma. He goes on to become a first-rate jailhouse lawyer, fighting his case from appeal to appeal. As the book ends, Alfredo's latest petition for a retrial, which has gathered dust for more than a year on the desk of a New York judge, is at last read and approved. "It is a task to retain self-respect," Alfredo writes grimly, "when you are required to be a participant in man's game of inhumanity." It is a game, Hunt suggests, that 200 million can play. .Brad Darrach

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