THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, May 4, 1984
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without asking questions. And the
defense attorney's job is to defend the
guilty."
Has working with a system that
he has lambasted as rotten also made
Dershowitz corrupt? "I hope not," he
said. In perhaps a bit of sophistry,
Dershowitz maintained that his
o—Tiness insulates him from judicial
aption. He is not a party to what
he terms the "conspiracy of silence
that shrouds the American justice
system."
"I talk about everything I do. I
keep it all in the sunlight," he said.
He tries to reform the system from
the outside, a maneuver that rankes
more insular colleagues. He writes
popular books and articles. He goes to
public forums and not just to bar
conventions. The quickness of mind
that served him well in the streets of
Brooklyn have made him into a
one-man force to make the "means of
justice" equal to the "ends ofjustice."
Dershowitz is not a wishy-washy
liberal whom Reaganites or
Buckleyites could accuse of being soft
on crime. "I want to see every
criminal punished," he said. But
I
In the marketplace of
ideas, you don't shut down
the shop by government
censorship if you don't like
the ideas. You simply
don't buy the product.
y
.
punishment should be eqitable. It
should be just. There should be no
double standards. Plea bargaining —
"an abomination" — should cease.
Capital punishment is racist.
Eighteen times as many blacks are
executed for killing whites as whites
are for killing blacks.
"I could justify the death penalty
in the United States if it was done
with mercy, if we did it to deter
crime," he said. But the death
penalty in the United States is not
that. One out of every 1,000
c
hkicides
results in execution. This
not punish murder. What is
punished by the death penalty today
is killing somebody if you're the
wrong race."
About four years ago,
Dershowitz predicted that crime
would decrease in the early 1980s
and that Ronald Reagan would take
full credit for it. "Margaret Sanger
deserves credit," he said. "Not
Reagan." Any country with many
males between the ages of 15 and 24,
he said, will have a high rate of
violent crime. This tapers slightly
between the ages of 24 and 35. After
35, there is virtually a complete drop.
As the post-World War II baby
boom generation has matured in
recent years, there has been an
overall drop in crime. But at the same
time, there has also been an increase
in the number of blacks and
Hispanics between the ages of 14 and
24. This will probably boost crime
among these two minorities and
exacerbate racial tensions.
One move that could shrink
crime, Dershowitz said, would be the
legalization of drugs. Heroin addicts
commit 26 percent of violent crimes
in the United States. Yet, he pointed
out, the response from the federal
government has been to make it
harder to get heroin. This drives the
price up by driving the supply down.
It's impossible to prevent heroin from
being smuggled ih. And there's no
instance of an addict giving up his
addiction because he couldn't afford
it. They just steal more."
"We will not see addicts become
IBM executives overnight. We will
not see them flocking to the churches
overnight. We will not see them
become decent people overnight. But
we will see a dramatic decrease in
violent crimes committed by addicts
in the middle of the night if we have
clinics open 24 hours a day where
they can get a sterile injection. Why
don't we adopt this? Because
politicians have taken over the issue
of crime. It's easier for them to urge
the abolishment of the insanity
defense, to demand more capital
punishment. We don't have
politicians who say, let's lower the
cost of drugs and raise the cost of
guns.'
Dershowitz's manning of the
legal barricades for the poor, for the
guilty, for blacks and Hispanics, for
the often-beleaguered Bill of Rights
has not won him many new friends in
the Jewish community. He is often
asked — as if the two were
incompatible — whether he is a
Jewish lawyer or a civil liberties
lawyer, a Jewish lawyer or a civil
rights lawyer.
"Twenty years ago, I would
never have been asked such a thing,"
Dershowitz commented. These
questions have emerged, he said,
because of the current breach
between blacks and Jews. And also
beciause, "as Jews have seen
themselves more and more potential
victims of crime and less and less
victims of injustice, they have
become less concerned with the
means of justice."
But until judicial means and
ends are reconciled, until the first ten
amendments are considered
•
sacrosanct by everyone, Dershowitz,
the whiz kid from Brooklyn, will still
have a mission. Protecting the justice
system from its own indiscretions
may not give him much of a rest. But
being a scapper in the courts sure
beats being a street fighter in the old
neighborhood.
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The Midrasha College of
Jewish Studies presents its
28
th
Annual
Mina and
Theodore Bargmon
Memorial Lecture Series
CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE:
JEWISH LEADERSHIP IN TRANSITION
Wednesday • May 9, 1984 • 8:00 p.m.
Where: United Hebrew Schools LoMed Auditorium
21550 West Twelve Mile Rood • Southfield
•
352-7117 or 354-1050
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AT NO CHARGE
THE PROGRAM
Topic: Jewish Community:
Present and Future
Dote:
May 9, 19848:00 p.m.
Dr. David Sidorsky
Professor of Philosophy,
Columbia University
BARGMAN INSTITUTE PLANNING COMMITTEE
Dr. Maxwell Bordenstein, Chairperson Dr. Joseph Epel Dr. living Panush
Janis Waxenberg. Vice-Chairperson
Dr. Zvi Gitelman Abraham Pasternak
Dr. Eli Bosse
Neil Gross
Rose Schiller
Alex Blumenberg
Rose Kaye
Edwin Shifrin
Dr. Elliot Burns
Marcia Kersch
Arthur Sugarman
Dr. Gerald A. Teller
Dr. Jock Wayne
Renee Wohl
Marilyn Wolfe
27