Word: contempt
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Many Americans harbor an unwholesome and even dangerous contempt for the justice system. Neither criminals nor victims have much faith in its workings: the one class does not fear it much, and the other does not trust it. A mugger leaves a victim crippled, life blighted, and bound to ruinous expenses for treatment. Through plea bargaining and parole indulgences, the attacker emerges from his "punishment" in a matter of months or less, to resume his career. The social contract gets badly tattered in its passage through such a system...
...overburdened system has been further complicated by the society's spasms of conscience. These arise from the larger unsolved questions of social justice in the U.S., principally poverty and racism. But those questions cannot be solved by a mindless leniency toward criminals in the courts. That policy invites contempt from the poor, who are much more likely than others to be the victims of criminals, and who, in fact, are more likely to favor the death penalty...
...object of Long's contempt and ridicule was the celebrated "compromise" on deregulation of natural gas, which emerged from a Senate-House committee three weeks ago and seemed to herald the passage of Carter's long-stalled energy bill. That, in turn, seemed to permit Carter to take off for a vacation in the Rockies. But the compromise, which would increase the price of most natural gas by 15% immediately and then continue raising prices each year until controls end in 1985, has many enemies. Consumer groups oppose the price increases as excessive, while the gas industry wants...
...mighty New York Times has been a melancholy place: its presses stopped by a strike, its newsroom empty; one of its reporters, Myron Farber, yo-yoing between jail cell and court hearings on contempt charges; the paper itself hit by a $100,000 fine for contempt and a $5,000-a-day fine for every day it continued to defy a New Jersey court in the same Farber case. To top it all off, in its legal difficulties, the Times seemed to be losing public support and press sympathy-partly because of "terrible coverage," says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper...
James Goodale, executive vice president of the Times for legal matters, points out that Nixon got a hearing before turning over his papers. And though U.S. Attorney Gen eral Griffin Bell was recently cited for contempt for protecting FBI sources, nobody put him in jail, like Farber, while the appeals went on. Yet a federal judge in New Jersey, refusing to release Farber and calling him "evil," ruled so intemperately that he didn't even get his facts straight. The Farber case seems to have this effect. He had "discovered" that Farber had a $75,000 advance...