"A Struggle with the Police & the Law," is Justice John Paul Stevens' third essay in the New York Review of Books since his retirement from the Supreme Court. It's a review of The Rape Case: A Young Lawyer’s Struggle for Justice in the 1950s, by Irving Morris, published by the University of Delaware Press.
The Rape Case: A Young Lawyer’s Struggle for Justice in the 1950s, by Irving Morris, tells us at least as much about its author as it does about the facts of the underlying case, which concerned an encounter between an unnamed young woman and three young men in Wilmington, Delaware’s Woodlawn Park in the early hours of October 30, 1947. The book, Morris writes, “is essentially the story of a fledgling lawyer’s struggle to overturn the result of a flawed trial by proving…police perjury.”
Irving Morris’s vivid recollection of events that occurred many decades ago demonstrates how the intangible benefits that lawyers receive from unpaid devotion to their profession generally far exceed the value of fees received from paying clients. I have often quoted the advice that John Adams gave to a younger lawyer: “Now, to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge well digested, and ready at command to assist the feeble and friendless…?” Morris’s story exemplifies this lesson. As he writes toward the end of the book, “Even though my clients paid little, I know I have earned far beyond what I ever imagined I might receive from successfully representing them.”
As the story unfolds, we learn how a competent lawyer responds to a series of defeats in protracted litigation. We are not told about the later events that made Irving Morris a leader of the corporate bar and the president of the Delaware State Bar Association.
And:
Arbitrariness in the imposition of the death penalty is exactly the type of thing the Constitution prohibits, as Justice Lewis Powell, Justice Potter Stewart, and I explained in our joint opinion in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). We wrote that capital sentencing procedures must be constructed to avoid the random or capricious imposition of the penalty, akin to the risk of being struck by lightning. Today one of the sources of such arbitrariness is the decision of state prosecutors—which is not subject to review—to seek a sentence of death. It is a discretionary call that may be influenced by the prosecutor’s estimate of the impact of his decision on his chances for reelection or for election to higher office.
Justice Stevens' November 2010 essay in the New York Review of Books reviewed David Garland's Peculiar Institution; his November 2011 NYRB essay reviewed William Stuntz' The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Related posts are in the books index. More from Justice Stevens on the death penalty is also available.
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