The Charlotte News

Monday, February 5, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the greatest force of allied tanks yet mounted in Korea had struck to within five air miles of Seoul this date, mauling the Chinese forces all along the route and then withdrawing to the south. It was one of three tank-infantry columns which moved northward toward Seoul. The major thrust was against the enemy troops dug into the hills around Anyang, nine air miles south of the former South Korean capital. The forces took Anyang almost unopposed and continued rolling northward. Lt. General Matthew Ridgway, ground commander of the forces, watched the action from a few hundred yards distant. An Eighth Army spokesman said that the three-pronged advance marked the greatest exploitation of armor yet during the war, but added that the approach of U.N. tanks to Seoul should not be regarded as significant at the present time. Two of the columns had already returned to the defense line and the third was on its way back.

A late bulletin reports of allied forces gaining four miles in four hours in central Korea, north of Hoengsong, 53 miles southeast of Seoul, against light resistance, starting in the predawn hours and still ongoing at noon.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky had provided a diplomatic note in reply to the four Western powers' inquiry regarding the latest response to the five-power conference proposal, wherein the Soviets had asked that the German question take top priority, to which the four Western powers had sought clarification. The four Western powers had expressed willingness to participate in the conference as long as all major East-West questions were considered.

The Post Office extended its mail embargo on certain classes of mail, imposed because of the "sick" strike by the railroad switchmen, tying up the nation's freight. Freight traffic through the Carolinas was improved during the weekend but remained hampered by the strike.

In Congress, Representative George Andrews of Alabama introduced a measure to allow immediate induction of striking railroad employees who held draft deferments because of their work in an essential industry.

Meanwhile, mediation talks to end the strike were deadlocked.

The Administration, via Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, asked Congress to add four percent to the Federal income tax rates, double the gasoline tax, increase by three cents per pack the tax on cigarettes, triple the tax on automobiles, and more than double that on appliances and other items. The tax on a fifth of whiskey would increase by about 60 cents and that on a bottle of beer by 13 cents. Mr. Snyder also proposed an increase in the capital gains tax rate from 25 to 37.5 percent and an extension of the required holding period for property to qualify for the treatment, from six months to twelve months. In addition, corporate taxes under the proposal would rise by eight percent, from 25 to 33 percent for corporations earning net income below $25,000, and from 47 to 55 percent for those with income above that level.

The Senate-House joint committee on economic mobilization invited Price administrator Mike DiSalle and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath to come to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to try to resolve their differences on who should enforce price controls, the Office of Price Stabilization, as contended by Mr. DiSalle, or the Justice Department, as General McGrath believed.

The National Production Authority froze the price of cattle hides, calfskins and kips until March 15, pending establishment of Government control to assure military supplies.

It's cold in Korea. They need those frozen hides.

Selective Service administrator, General Lewis Hershey, announced that new regulations were being prepared for an executive order to be signed by the President allowing the induction of childless married men between ages 19 and 26. Men with more than one dependent, regardless of whether spouse, child or elderly relative, would continue to receive deferments. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia told General Hershey that he favored calling up also deferred National Guardsmen and reservists, in an effort to forestall the drafting of 18-year olds, as previously advocated by the Administration to meet manpower quotas for the year.

In Washington, a Grand Jury indicted James V. Hunt, a key figure in the Senate's five-percenter investigation, the indictment alleging that he had agreed illegally to serve private businesses before the War Assets Administration while he was a consultant for the agency.

In Richmond, Va., the last three members of the group of seven black Martinsville defendants, four of whom had been executed Friday, were executed this date, for the rape of a white woman two years earlier. Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton declined to issue a stay, as had Chief Justice Fred Vinson for the other four. The petition for the stay was based primarily on the contention that the defendants' counsel had presented a "pathetic" defense. The seven men had incriminated each other in signed statements and in oral testimony.

The Supreme Court of Virginia had ruled that there was no error by the trial court in denying the defendants' joint motion for change of venue prior to trial, despite the defendants' mutually incriminating confessions having been published in the newspapers; that the court's inquiry of prospective jurors as to whether each had any conscientious scruples against rendering a sentence of death, without also inquiring whether they had any scruples against imposing the minimum sentence, did not taint the selection process; that the corpus delicti of the crime was established independently of the confessions; that the reading of each defendant's confession at each of their respective trials, done without objection at trial, did not constitute error where there was no coercion demonstrated in obtaining the original confessions; that there was no evidence that the trial court ruled on the qualification of jurors in the absence of the presence of the accused; that while the court ruled on a motion in limine in the absence of the defendants, it was only preparatory to the conduct of the trial at which they were present; that there was no prejudicial error in allowing two police officers to remain in the courtroom during testimony, to which no objection had been made at trial by defendants; that there was no evidence shown that juries were likely in Virginia to convict a black defendant of rape of a white woman while not being willing to convict a white defendant or a defendant of any other race for rape of a black woman, that the laws governing sentencing applied to all defendants equally; that there was no error in allowing the defendants to be tried on nearly consecutive days, despite some jurors indicating that they had read newspaper accounts of the convictions of the defendants tried earlier; and that there was no merit in the contention to the trial court by one defendant, based on a variation in the location of his alleged assault of the woman between that to which he confessed and that to which the evidence indicated, such that the conviction was contrary to the law and the evidence presented against him.

Now, and for many decades, in such circumstances, pursuant to the holding in the 1968 Supreme Court case of Bruton v. U.S., finding admission, with only cautionary court instructions, of extrajudicial confessions by co-defendants to violate the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment, the right to confront and cross-examine all witnesses presented against the accused, a motion to sever the cases would be appropriate to sanitize the mutually incriminating statements so that each extrajudicial confession or admission of conduct falling short of a confession of the criminality would be heard only against the person making it and not against the co-defendants. While in the instant case there were separate trials of each defendant, save two in which there was a joint trial, the confessions appear to have been read in each successive trial without redacting the portions incriminating the other defendants, thus, while only violating the confrontation clause per Bruton in the joint trial—assuming that counsel for the accused in that trial did not, for reasonably calculated strategic reasons, not seek separate trials—, resulting in a state of unfairness generally because of the first trial having resulted in the publication of the defendant's confession, all of the trials being thereby tainted for lack of due process, as the press reported the confessions as they were presented in court, as before the trials during the preliminary hearing phase of the proceedings. Simply because, as the Court had pointed out, no state statute prohibited such publication, that fact did not cleanse the trials of the taint of denial of basic fairness required by due process, violating the spirit of the confrontation clause in each of the trials if not its letter as in the joint trial—similar to that subsequently held in 1966 by the Supreme Court was the case in Sheppard v. Maxwell, because of the publicity attendant the original 1954 trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the alleged murder of his wife.

Of course, the Sixth Amendment, or, for the most part, the rest of the Bill Rights, had not yet reached so far south as Virginia by 1951.

The worst winter storm to hit the South in 50 years had departed the region, leaving behind millions of dollars of damage. Alabama and Mississippi had been hit hard, as had Nashville, Tenn. Some 3,000 to 5,000 cattle had died in Florida, while others were left so weakened that they would die.

Stand up, little doggie, and get along. There's a place for you in the show at Raleigh, when they get the new coliseum built.

The "Our Weather" box examines the difference between four strong winds.

Pictured on the page, from St. Augustine, Fla., there's some kind of evil-looking, little four-foot, one-eyed snowman, packed with cryptic symbols embedded in its frozen girth, trying to sell fried shrimp and fried chicken to all the children to give them heart disease and make them fat. It's wrong. Knock that snowman down and melt it with a blowtorch. Kick him so he'll need a supporter below.

On the editorial page, "We're Either Too High or Too Low" tells of having preserved the Life Magazines from the period of the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944 and January, 1945, as the thought had been that it might be an historically pivotal time, with the Wehrmacht making substantial inroads to the Allied lines. But it was time, now, to throw them away. One issue, that of January 8, 1945, however, had stood out in the trash, as it fell open to an account of the Battle by Charles Wertenbaker. As a precis to the story, the Life editors had commented that the American people and the press, in their reaction to German advances, were blowing too hot or too cold, crying disaster at signs of German advance and undue proclamation of victory when the advances were temporarily scotched. They had found it partly the result of Americans' love of "big news" and partly because of heavy military censorship, making it difficult to convey a balanced picture of the fighting.