Word: bazelon
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...reputation, the District of Columbia appeals court is both innovative and liberal-though not so liberal as it used to be before President Nixon appointed three of its members. Its reputation derives from its dominant figure, David L. Bazelon, 64, who was appointed by President Truman 24 years ago and has served as chief judge since 1962. A judicial activist, he is best known for his pioneering opinion in the Durham case of 1954, in which he permitted a plea of not guilty by reason of mental illness, thus modernizing the 19th century M'Naghten rule that a criminal...
Other notable decisions of the Bazelon court...
...Most of Bazelon's views are shared by Judge J. Skelly Wright, 62, a courtly Southern gentleman who can be both tough and emotional in his opinions. Dissenting from the majority opinion favoring the Government in the 1971 Pentagon-papers case, for instance, Wright wrote: "As if the long and sordid war in Southeast Asia had not already done enough harm to our people, it now is used to cut out the heart of our free institutions and system of government...
...court's ruling on the presidential tapes will not derive primarily from the political leanings of the nine judges, to be sure. But it is worth noting that in addition to Bazelon and Wright, the court has three members who can be ranked as somewhat left of center: Carl McGowan, 62, who served as Adlai Stevenson's counsel while Stevenson was Governor of Illinois; Harold Leventhal, 58, onetime general counsel to the Democratic National Committee; and Spottswood W. Robinson III, 57, former dean of the Howard University Law School and the only black member of the court...
American Report. One argument Snezhnevsky was able to use privately was a report by a group of American psychiatrists, mental health officials and one eminent jurist, Washington Judge David Bazelon. They had toured Soviet mental hospitals in 1967 without perceiving any political abuse of psychiatric methods. Writing in the current New York Review of Books, Gadfly Journalist I.F. Stone details some of the evidence that both the World Psychiatric Association and the touring American doctors overlooked...