Andrew Mallory, R.I.P.

One of the sad ironies of justice is that noble legal principles sometimes derive from ignoble lives. So it was with Andrew Mallory, a 19-year-old drifter from South Carolina, who was arrested in Washington in 1954 on a charge of choking and raping a 38-year-old woman while she was doing her laundry. The police interrogated him for seven hours and got him to confess. The trial was delayed a year because of doubt that Mallory could understand the proceedings against him, but he was eventually sentenced to the electric chair. "May God have mercy on your soul," said the judge.

Two years later, it was the Supreme Court that showed mercy. It unanimously threw out the conviction on the grounds that the slowness in bringing Mallory before a magistrate was an "unnecessary delay" in violation of federal rules, and that such delays "must not be of a nature to give opportunity for the extraction of a confession." The so-called "Mallory rule" outraged police officials, and several Congressmen vainly submitted bills to overturn it. Not until the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control Act was it modified: a confession is now admissible if a judge rules that it was voluntary and that the delay before presentation to a magistrate was not unreasonably longer than six hours.

As for Mallory, he was given back his possessions--a gray suit and $12.60 --and turned loose. Wandering from job to job, he finally found work as a baby sitter for a Washington couple. When they fired him, Mallory broke into their home and beat the wife, but the police could not find him. In 1960, police in Philadelphia arrested him for entering a house and beating and raping a mother of four children. Convicted of assault, he served another eleven years, emerging last October.

Last week Mallory attacked a couple in a Philadelphia park, robbed the man of about $10 and allegedly ordered the woman to take her clothes off. A policeman chased him through the park. When Mallory aimed a gun at his pursuer, another officer fired four shots and killed him. He was 37.

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