The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 16, 1952

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Sam Summerlin, that U.S. soldiers explained in detail how they and South Korean guards had shot to death 84 Communist prisoners of war in quelling an attempted mass breakout by 4,500 Communists the prior Sunday on Pongam Island, just off Koje Island, where a riot had resulted in 81 deaths of prisoners the previous February. Two Americans and three South Koreans, as well as 118 prisoners, had also been injured during the 55-minute standoff with 300 guards. The prisoners, locked arm-in-arm and singing Communist songs, ignored repeated volleys of close-range fire and had lifted their dead and wounded as they fell. After the gun battle, the guards had to loosen the locked arms of many of the prisoners before they could drag them from the stockade. Newsmen toured the island this date and entered the compound where most of the prisoners had died. The commander of the compound stated that he regretted the deaths but said that they had brought it on themselves, testing the strength of the guards and losing. He said that the tension, which had been mounting on the island before the outbreak, had ended. He said that if he had not taken the action, half the prisoners would have broken out of the compound and many more lives might have been lost. He indicated that barbed wire could not hold determined prisoners. He had been tipped on the planned outbreak by two notes scribbled by prisoners, the first left near a gate, suggesting a December 7 breakout attempt which had not occurred, and the second seized from a prisoner who had tried to destroy it.

In Paris, British Admiral Earl Mountbatten had been appointed by the British chiefs of staff as commander of all of NATO's naval forces in the Mediterranean with the exception of the U.S. part, commanded by Admiral Robert Carney. Both Admirals would report to General Matthew Ridgway, supreme commander of NATO. The military leaders of the 14 NATO nations had agreed the previous week on a compromise whereby a Briton would take over the command, while the U.S. Sixth Fleet would be concerned primarily with supporting NATO's land forces, resolving a longstanding dispute as to whether a Briton or American would command in the Mediterranean.

In Leghorn, Italy, four Navy helicopters rescued the last of the 39 crewmen who had been aboard the Grommet Reefer, which had split in half during a powerful gale storm, forcing aground the stern, which held the crew. The helicopters rescued 13 of the men after 26 had been removed by breeches buoy and boat. The original report, indicating that 40 had been aboard, had been in error.

In New York, President-elect Eisenhower was scheduled to meet this date with Prime Minister Sidney Holland of New Zealand, to discuss the Pacific defense alliance in which the U.S. was a partner. The Prime Minister had been in London for a conference regarding the alliance with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The alliance was presently composed of the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, and indications were that Britain might join. The organization had been referred to as the "NATO of the Pacific". The previous day, the President-elect had met with John J. McCloy, former U.S. High Commissioner to West Germany and Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles, Mr. McCloy stating afterward that they had talked about the steps which might be taken in relation to European unity. The President-elect had also met earlier with Harold Stassen, the designated head of the Mutual Security Administration.

The President declared this date, in a prepared talk before the Alumni Association of the Armed Forces Industrial College in Washington, that his Administration's leadership in the worldwide struggle against Communism had saved hundreds of millions of people from slavery. He stated that any cutback in defense was "very dangerous talk", expressing confidence that the American people could distinguish between true economy and false economy. The story quotes extensively from the address.

In Toronto, two members of a gang of bank robbers were hanged this date for the murder of a Toronto detective on March 6, when the detective approached a suspicious automobile during a hunt for the gang. Canada didn't waste any time in meting out swift capital punishment in those days either.

In Des Moines, Ia., a 93-year old man became a father for the 13th time when his wife, 28, gave birth to a daughter the previous day. They had had five other children since their marriage in 1945. The father was half Cherokee Indian and half Spanish and had seven children by two earlier marriages. He still worked regularly at a farm equipment firm.

He may be lying about his age.

In Clover, S.C., Dr. William Pressly Grier, 65, a leader in South Carolina's Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, died after a long illness. One of his brothers, Dr. R. C. Grier, was president of Erskine College at Due West. Another brother was a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia.

In Greenville, S.C., a fire threatened three furniture stores on the main street and raged out of control as all available firemen and equipment rushed to the scene shortly before noon, the fire having erupted in the basement of one of the stores and spreading to the two stores on either side. Flames were seen through the roof of the store where the fire had started.

John Daly of The News tells of approximately 150 leaders of the North Carolina businesses meeting this date in Charlotte to support the Transportation Association of America's broad program to defend free enterprise in transportation and constitutional government from threatening socialism. The first speaker said that the nation's transportation systems would be the "first victim of the socialistic state".

That sounds like loads of fun. Where's Mr. Hoffa?

In Winston-Salem, a man reported being robbed of $4,300, involving at least three persons, during the morning, while in the revolving door of the Wachovia Bank after he had cashed a check, the funds intended to pay off his mortgage. Police theorized that it might be the same group who obtained $805 in cash from another man a few weeks earlier as he boarded a bus on Courthouse Square. One of the three men had feigned a heart attack in the bank and dropped to the floor, jamming the revolving door ahead of the victim. Two heavyset men then rushed up, according to witnesses, and began rocking the door back and forth to confuse the victim, and when they got through the door, disappeared quickly, as did the man who had pretended to have a heart attack. The victim said that he did not know exactly how his money had been stolen, but that it was taken in some way as he was shoved out the door.

Well, as with most banks, it's a revolving door kind of operation, deposit with one hand and pay with the other, leaving a balance of a few shekels, which the bank then takes as its "service" fees. Charge the bank with the robbery for failing to protect the depositor adequately. Book 'em...

Incidentally, returning for a moment to "Don't Bother to Knock", referenced in a story on the previous day's front page, the Supreme Court the previous day had also decided Schwartz v. Texas, 344 U.S. 199, holding, in an 8 to 1 decision, with Justice William O. Douglas dissenting, that evidence obtained through a wiretap which would have offended the Fourth Amendment under Federal law and thus would have been excluded from evidence in a Federal case, was nevertheless not subject to the exclusionary rule under Texas law, based on the Court previously holding in 1949 in Wolf v. Colorado that, while the Fourth Amendment proscriptions were binding on the states pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause, exclusion of illegally acquired evidence was not thereby required—in that era of preservation of states' rights to the point of plain intellectual hypocrisy, for if the evidence was not subject to exclusion, holding it to have been illegally acquired is no more than a Pyrrhic victory without consequence. We reference it not because of the holding, as it was subsequently expressly overruled in 1968 by the Supreme Court in Lee v. Florida, 392 U.S. 378, a 6 to 3 decision announced by Eisenhower appointee Justice Potter Stewart, with dissents, counterintuitively, filed by Justices Hugo Black, John Harlan and Byron White, holding that, pursuant to Mapp v. Ohio and other intervening decisions after Schwartz overruling Wolf, the remedial exclusionary rule is a part of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, thus holding such wiretap evidence illegally obtained under the Fourth Amendment proscriptions to have been improperly held by the state court to be not excludable. Rather, it is to show the development of the law through time and the reasons for that development, not to make the job of law enforcement tougher and to afford escapes for criminals, but rather to accord better, for the benefit of all of us, the spirit and intent of the Constitution as experience demonstrated over time was necessary to effect, in relation to the Fourth Amendment, as has also been the case regarding the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and Miranda rights, a deterrent to improper police behavior, which might, in some instances, result in injustices, and which, in any event, keeps the police, or any of the King's men, from barging into your home without a warrant or emergent probable cause, such as in the case of hot pursuit of an ongoing crime, or from setting up illegal wiretaps and surveillance devices, or, in the case of the Fifth Amendment, from extracting ostensible confessions through the old rubber-hose treatment or its physical or mental equivalent. Anyway, we neglected it yesterday because we did not have the energy to tackle it and because it was not mentioned on the front page. One cannot go back and look at individual cases in the law from the past, even though decided by the Supreme Court, and necessarily conclude thereby that one has a thorough understanding of the law as it exists today, without also being cognizant of the fact that certain areas of the law, especially regarding Constitutional interpretation or those governed by particular statutes, change through time. We used to call that process of running down subsequent treatment of holdings Shepardization, in the days before online legal resources, because Shepard's was the source where one looked up a case citation to determine subsequent cases citing the case in question, to pin down whether the case had been distinguished, followed or overruled. Nowadays, while online or library Shepardization per se can still be done, we are able, in most instances, simply to look in the search engines to ascertain the same issues. If a case has been overruled by subsequent decision of a higher court, either in the same case or in another case, it is generally no longer citable for the point on which it was overruled, except to demonstrate the historical development of a particular issue in the law.

In Miami, the temperature dropped to 41 degrees this date, making it the coldest December 16 since 1916.

In Charlotte, The News Empty Stocking Fund drive was underway and a story indicates the various needs of different families for funding with which to purchase their own gifts. It also lists numerous contributors and their contributions, indicating that to date $4,826.80 had been collected. The previous year, $5,780 had been collected by December 15 and $6,016 by December 17. It encourages contributions, lest the fund deprive needy families of $1,000 worth of gifts.

Hey, let 'em go out and work for their gifts like the rest of us. We have to use that money to fight Communists and socialists expanding socialism into business.

On the editorial page, "Little Davidson Tops the Goliaths" tells of Davidson College having a senior who had been selected as a Rhodes Scholar, bringing to ten the number of graduates of Davidson who had achieved that honor, more than any other university or college in the state. Only 32 Americans were chosen for Rhodes Scholarships each year out of the more than 1.5 million men enrolled in higher education in 1950. Davidson had only 828 students and had never topped 1,000. Thus, if the law of averages held, Davidson should have produced no more than about one Rhodes Scholar during the previous 50 years since the establishment of the scholarship in 1903.