License Laws for Passenger Cars

AMERICAN AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION

a. Full driving privileges at age set forth in "Regular"
column. A license restricted or qualified in some
manner may be obtained at age set forth in
"Restricted" column.

b. Guardian or parental consent required.

с Must have completed approved Driver Ed

Training course, d. Learner's Permit required.

e. Driver with Learner's Permit must be
accompanied by locally licensed operator 18
years or older.

f. Restricted to mopeds.

g. Must be enrolled in Driver Ed.

h. Driver with Learner's Permit must be

accompanied by locally licensed operator 21 years or older.

LAW, CRIME, AND JUSTICE 99

FEDERAL COURTS

SUPREME COURT

EXTENT OF CRIME

The separate system of federal courts, which operates alongside the state courts, handles cases which arise under the U.S. Constitution or under any law or treaty, as well as any controversy to which the federal government is itself a party. Federal courts also hear disputes involving governments or citizens of different states.

All federal judges are appointed for life. A case which falls within federal jurisdiction is heard first before a federal district judge. An appeal may be made to the Circuit Court of Appeals, and, possibly, in the last resort, to the highest court in the land: the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court hears cases in which someone claims that a lower court ruling is unjust or in which someone claims that Constitutional law has been violated. Its decisions are final and become legally binding. Although the Supreme Court does not have the power to make laws, it does have the power to examine actions of the legislative, executive, and administrative institutions of the government and decide whether they are constitutional. It is in this function that the Supreme Court has the potential to influence decisively the political, social, and economic life of the country.

In the past, Supreme Court rulings have given new protection and freedom to blacks and other minorities. The Supreme Court has nullified certain laws of Congress and has even declared actions of American presidents unconstitu­tional.

The U.S. government is so designed that, ideally, the authority of the judicial branch is independent from the other branches of government. Each of the nine Supreme Court justices (judges) is appointed by the president and examined by the Senate to determine whether he or she is qualified. Once approved, a justice remains on the Supreme Court for life. The Supreme Court justices have no obligation to follow the political policies of the president or Congress. Their sole obligation is to uphold the laws of the Constitution.

Nevertheless, politics play a role in a president's selection of a Supreme Court justice. On average, a president can expect to appoint two new Supreme Court justices during one term of office. Presidents are likely to appoint justices whose views are similar to their own, with the hope that they can extend some of their power through the judicial branch.

President Reagan's appointments to the Supreme Court were judges with a decidedly conservative view of constitutional law. Conservatives in America hope that the present Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, will override precedents such as the Burger Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion, or that it will vote for limiting the rights of criminal suspects and defendants.

The United States is notorious for its high crime rates. After three years of decline, the crime rate rose 5 percent in 1985. In that year, over 12 million crimes were committed. In urban ghettos, violence is so widespread that homicide is the leading cause of death among black males between the ages of 25 and 45. Auto theft, muggings, robberies, and burglaries occur so frequently, especially in cities, that many people live in constant.fear of crime. In 1983, 45 percent of Americans surveyed admitted they were afraid to go out alone at

Rehnquist, William: born 1925, American jurist, chief justice since 1986.

Burger, Warren Earl: born 1907, American jurist, chief justice of the Supreme Court 1969-86.

100 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

RIGHTS OF CRIMINAL SUSPECTS

THE DEATH PENALTY

PROBLEMS FOR LAW ENFORCERS

night in their own neighborhoods. Statistics indicate that only 20 percent of the people involved in illegal activity are apprehended. Many of these criminals belong to organized crime networks, among them, the Mafia, drug smuggling rings, and street gangs.

Courts have the difficult task of striking a balance between the needs of society on the one hand and the rights of the individual on the other. The Constitution's guarantee of equal justice under the law for all citizens not only guarantees the individual's right to freedom and security, but also includes the protection of the rights of criminal suspects. Among these guarantees are the protection from unreasonable search and seizure, the suspect's right to decline to testify against himself/herself, the right to counsel, as well as protection from excessive bail and from cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court has devised several rules to ensure the protection of these rights, which sometimes result in a guilty suspect being released from charges. One of these rules is the controversial exclusionary rule, which excludes from the trial any evidence gained by unlawful search and seizure. Sometimes the exclusion of evidence from a trial means that some persons who are clearly guilty go free because of a technicality. The Miranda rule is another controversial Supreme Court decision which extends the rights of criminal suspects. In the 1966 case, the Court ruled that suspects must be read their legal rights before being questioned by police. They must be told of their right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning. If the police do not inform the criminal suspect of his or her rights, any evidence gained from questioning cannot be used in court.

Looking for ways to secure community safety amidst rampant crime, many people hope that a more conservative court will weaken these protections, many of which derive from precedents created by the liberal Supreme Court of the 1960s. Conservatives view these protections as serious obstacles to effective law enforcement. Others, however, hold that the weakening of the rights of criminal suspects endangers the rights of all innocent people and gives too much power to the police.

Responding to public pressure to get tough with criminals, many states have been applying the death penalty as a deterrent to murder. Although few criminals were sentenced to death between 1965 and 1983, there has been a surge in recent years in the number of executions. Between 1970 and 1980, three prisoners were executed under the death penalty, and between 1980 and 1985, 47 prisoners were executed. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty, as carried out in most states, was unconstitutional because it was applied disproportionately to blacks and other minorities. States have since revised their death penalty laws, establishing new Court-approved pro­cedures. Supporters of the death penalty argue that it is the only appropriate punishment for sadistic murderers. Opponents of capital punishment hope to see it declared unconstitutional. They claim that there is not enough evidence to prove that murderers are deterred by the threat of execution.

Crime-stopping and crime prevention are formidable tasks for law enforce­ment officials, since the social problems which aggravate violence—poverty, unemployment, and unstable families—are likely to persist. In addition to the overcrowding in prisons, the accessibility of handguns is a major problem which further complicates the task of securing public safety.

LAW, CRIME, AND JUSTICE 101

Methods of Execution¹

1. On July 1. 1976, by a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the death penalty as not being "cruel or unusual." However, in another ruling the same day, the Court, by a 5-4 vote, stated that states may not impose "mandatory" capital punishment on every person convicted of murder. These decisions left uncertain the fate of condemned persons throughout the U.S. On Oct. 4, the Court refused to reconsider its July ruling, which allows some states to proceed with executions of condemned prisoners. The first execution in this country since 1967 was in Utah on Jan. 17, 1977. Gary Mark Gilmore was executed by shooting. 2. Voted to restore death penalty after June 29, 1972, Supreme Court decision ruling capital punishment unconstitutional. 3. Person shall be executed by gas if he commits murder while serving a prison term. 4. Method shall be that used by state in which sentence is imposed. If state does not have death penalty, federal judge shall prescribe method for carrying out sentence. 5. Death penalty has been passed, but not been used. 6. Defendant may choose between hanging and a lethal injection. Source: Information Please questionnaires to the states. NOTE: An asterisk after the name of the state indicates non-reply.

OVERCROWDED PRISONS

The nation's prisons, many of which are old and rundown, must operate above capacity to accommodate the number of inmates. One way to relieve overcrowding is parole, the conditional release of a prisoner before the term of his or her sentence has expired. Nevertheless, many states, responding to public pressure to get tough with criminals, have changed their laws. For example, some states have imposed longer sentences for serious crimes and have restricted parole. The result of heavier prison sentences is that prisons are filling up before state and federal authorities can find the money to build new facilities.

102 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

GUN CONTROL

SELF-DEFENSE

Many lawmakers favor stricter gun control laws as a method of curbing crime. Americans now own 65 million pistols and revolvers, two handguns for every three households. Even sophisticated rapid-fire combat weapons are available. An FBI report revealed that firearms were involved in more than half of the murders in the United States in 1984. Proponents of gun control are pressing the government to at least require registration of all handguns and to require background checks on all potential handgun buyers to ensure that they do not have a criminal record. Some opponents of handguns favor a complete ban on their sale and possession. While 70 percent of all Americans surveyed in 1985 favored registration of handguns, only 4 percent favored having a law to ban sale and possession. All the same, the lobbies against gun control are very influential. Congress passed a bill in 1985 to loosen restrictions on firearms, despite protest from law enforcers. Many Americans fear that gun control laws will prevent law-abiding citizens from being able to protect their homes.

Lacking confidence in the ability of the courts, the police, and legislators to deal swiftly with the problem of crime, many Americans look for ways to protect themselves from attacks and burglaries. Refusing to be victimized, some people are willing to break the law in order to defend themselves. When New York subway passenger Bernhard Goetz took the law into his own hands to avoid being the victim of another crime, he was hailed as a hero by most New Yorkers. The incident occurred in 1984 on a subway train when four youths demanded five dollars from him. Goetz, a man with no criminal record who had already been mugged and severely beaten several months earlier, reacted by pulling out a gun and shooting the four youths, all of whom had criminal records, including convictions for armed robbery and burglary. In a three-month trial in 1987 Goetz was finally acquitted of all but the relatively minor charge of illegally possessing a gun. The public's support for Goetz indicates Americans' frustration with the criminal justice system's inadequacy in protecting individual rights. Until measures are taken to address the soda] factors which cause violence, crime wi\\ continue to aftect a \axge segment d the population.

part в Texts

О About Men

BY BRENT STAPLES

A BROTHER'S MURDER

T HAS BEEN MORE than two years since my telephone rang with the news that my younger brother Blake - just 22 years old — had been mur­dered. The young man who killed him was only 24. Wearing a ski mask, he emerged from a car, fired six times at close range with a massive .44 Magnum, then fled. The two had once been insepar­able friends. A senseless rivalry — beginning, I think, with an argument over a girlfriend — escalated from posturing, to threats, to violence, to murder. The way the two were living, death could have come to either of them from anywhere. In fact, the assailant had already survived multiple gunshot wounds from an incident much like the one in which my brother lost his life.

As I wept for Blake I felt wrenched backward into events and circum­stances that had seemed light-years gone. Though a decade apart, we both were raised in Chester, Pa., an angry, heavily black, heavily poor, industrial city southwest of Philadelphia. There, in the 1960's, I was introduced to mortality, not by the old and failing, but by beautiful young men who lay wrecked after sudden explosions of violence. The first, I remember from my 14th year — Johnny, brash lover of fast cars, stabbed to death two doors from my. house in a fight over a pool game. The next year, my teenage cousin, Wesley, whom I loved very much, was shot dead. The summers blur.

Milton, an angry young neighbor, shot a crosstown rival, wounding him badly. William, another teenage neighbor, took a shotgun blast to the shoulder in some urban drama and displayed his bandages proudly. His brother, Leonard, severely beaten, lost an eye and donned a black patch. It went on.

I recall not long before I left for college, two local Vietnam veterans — one from the Marines, 6ne from the Army — arguing fiercely, nearly at blows about which outfit had done the most in the war. The most killing, they meant. Not much later, I read a

magazine article that set that dispute in a context. In the story, a non­commissioned officer — a sergeant, I believe — said he would pass up any number of affluent, suburban-born recruits to get hard-core soldiers from the inner city. They jumped into the rice paddies with "their manhood on their sleeves," I believe he said. These two items — the veterans arguing and the sergeant's words — still characterize for me the circumstances under which black men in their teens and 20's kill one another with such frequency. With a touchy paranoia born of living battered lives, they are

104 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

1. continued

desperate to be real men. Killing is only machismo taken to the extreme. Incursions to be punished by death were many and minor, and they re­main so: they include stepping on the wrong toe, literally; cheating in a drug deal; simply saying "I dare you" to someone holding a gun; crossing territorial lines in a gang dispute. My brother grew up to wear his manhood on his sleeve. And when he died, he was in that group — black, male and in its teens and early 2()'s — that is far and away the most likely to murder or be murdered.

I left the East Coast after college, spent the mid- and late-1970s in Chicago as a graduate student, taught for a time, then became a journalist. Within 10 years of leaving my home­town, I was overeducated and "up­wardly mobile," ensconced on a quiet, tree-lined street where voices raised in anger were scarcely ever heard. The telephone, like some grim umbilical, kept me connected to the old world with news of deaths, im­prisoning and misfortune. I felt emotionally beaten up. Perhaps to protect myself, I added a psycho­logical dimension to the physical dis­tance I had already achieved. I rarely visited my hometown. I shut it out.

As I fled the past, so Blake em­braced it. On Christmas of 1983, I

traveled from Chicago to a black sec­tion of Roanoke.Va., where he then lived. The desolate public housing projects, the hopeless, idle young men crashing against one another — these reminded me of the embittered town we'd grown up in. It was a place where once I would have been comfortable, or at least sure of my­self. Now, hearing of my brother's forays into crime, his scrapes with police and street thugs, I was scared, unsteady on foreign terrain.

I saw that Blake's romance with the street life and the hustler image had flowered dangerously. One eve­ning that late December, standing in some Roanoke dive among drug dealers and grim, hair-trigger losers, I told him I feared for his life. He had affected the image of the tough he wanted to be. But behind the dark glasses and the swagger, I glimpsed the baby-faced toddler I'd once watched over. I nearly wept. I wanted desperately for him to live. The young think themselves immortal, and a dangerous light shone in his eyes as he spoke laughingly of making fools of the policemen who had raided his apartment looking for drugs. He cried out as I took his right hand. A line of stitches lay between the thumb and index fmger. Kickback from a shotgun, he explained, nothing

serious. Gunplay had become part of his life.

I lacked the language simply to say: Thousands have lived this for you and died. I fought the urge to lift him bodily and shake him. This place and the way you are living smells of death to me, I said. Take some time away, I said. Let's go downtown tomorrow and buy a plane ticket anywhere, take a bus trip, anything to get away and-cool things off. He took my alarm casually. We arranged to meet the following night — an appointment he would not keep. We embraced as though through glass. I drove away.

As I stood in my apartment in Chicago holding the receiver that evening in February 1984, I felt as though part of my soul had been cut away. I questioned myself then, and I still do. Did I not reach back soon or earnestly enough for him? For weeks I awoke crying from a recurrent dream in which I chased him, ur­gently trying to get him to read a document I had, as though reading it would protect him from what had happened in waking life. His eyes shining like black diamonds, he smiled and danced just beyond my grasp. When I reached for him, I caught only the space where he had been.

LAW, CRIME, AND JUSTICE 105

ОLAW & JUSTICE

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Date: 2015-12-18; view: 715