"Charles L. Harness-Probable Cause" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

to let a case get to you, Helen. Not even Tyson v. New York. Especially not Tyson."
"Ben, do you think Frank Tyson shot President Cromway?"
"What I think about it personally is irrelevant. I can think about it only as a judge. And being a judge,
even on this Court, is a job like any other. We get paid for interpreting laws made by other people. Our
personal feelings of right and wrong are supposed to be irrelevant." How could he explain to her that he
himself had never learned how to deal with that bitterest judicial duty-- to decide whether a man lives or
dies-- and that he was reconciled to the knowledge he would never learn how to deal with it? He had
never understood the rationale of capital punishment. After a history of six thousand years, it did not
deter murders that led to further capital punishment. Maybe it had reduced the number? There was no
way to tell. There was no control experiment. He shrugged. "The only thing that you and I and our seven
brothers will have to think about is whether New York violated Tyson's constitutional rights in convicting
him. As a Lincolnian, you must appreciate that."
"I know. Poor Dr. Mudd-- his only crime was to set the broken leg of a stranger-- who later turned
out to be John Wilkes Booth. For which he was sentenced to life imprisonment."
"And Mrs. Surratt, in whose house the conspirators met."
"Yes. Even when the hangman pulled the black bag over her head, she did not understand."
They both looked around. Edmonds' secretary was standing in the doorway. "Excuse me, sir. The
five-minute buzzer."
Edmonds nodded.
Helen Nord took a last puzzled look at the photograph before she put it away in her briefcase.
Edmonds followed her out into the corridor.
***


Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the
government. The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not
likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the government,
without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will
be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic
and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts, and emotions.
-- Justice Brandeis, dissenting in
Olmstead v. United States (1928)
***


At his first Friday conference, Edmonds had thought the custom rather silly: each of the nine justices of
the United States Supreme Court, the most prestigious body in the world, had to shake hands with the
eight others before they could take their seats around the long table. But now, after several years on the
high court, he could understand why Chief Justice Fuller had instituted the practice nearly a hundred
years ago. It softened the long-standing frictions and differences that might otherwise prevent nine totally
divergent minds from meshing together as a court. He thought wryly of analogies from the ring: "Shake
hands and come out fighting." Thirty-six handshakes. It was possible now, at eleven o'clock in the
morning. When they adjourned at six, it might not be.
And now they took their places around the long black table, Chief Justice Shelley Pendleton at the
south end, Senior Associate Justice Oliver Godwin at the north end, and the other associate justices, in
order of seniority, around the sides. The great John Marshall gave them his blessing from his portrait over
the ornate marble fireplace.
The face of Chief Justice Shelley Pendleton was a paradox-- almost ugly in its craggy, masklike
impassivity, yet capable of dissolving into a strangely beautiful humanity, warm, humorous, even humble.
It was whispered that he had retired to his office and wept after his first affirmation of a death penalty,