Word: court
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Assessing these decisions, attorney Floyd Abrams, a free-speech specialist, said they constituted a "reassuring week for the First Amendment." Said he: "The court has been considerably more sensitive to First Amendment rights than to other civil-liberties claims. Some of President Reagan's appointees have been refreshingly libertarian in their approach...
...court's attitude, however, was strikingly different in last week's criminal-law rulings. In two cases decided by 5-to-4 votes, the court handed a major defeat to defendants charged under federal drug and racketeering laws -- and to their attorneys. The high bench ruled that prosecutors may confiscate the assets that such a person intends to use for his legal defense if the property was gained through criminal activity. Under the rulings, the assets may even be temporarily frozen before the defendant is tried or convicted. Such seizures do not violate the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, wrote...
...secure those freedoms. It embodies, often in an intensely emotional way, the love and loyalty most Americans feel for their country. It stands for the unity of one nation and for the individual rights of each citizen. And now, because of a landmark ruling by a deeply divided Supreme Court, the American flag represents a land where people have the right to burn the American flag...
...precisely this veneration that makes burning the flag such a potent form of speech. And for the flag to truly stand for freedom of speech, the Supreme Court declared, it must stand for its most potent forms. "We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration," Justice William Brennan wrote, "for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents." Indeed, the decision that Americans have the right to desecrate their flag could be seen as yet another persuasive reason...
...Youth Brigade, who torched an American flag outside the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas. "America, the red, white and blue, we spit on you," chanted the crowd. Until now, despite the frequency with which the flag had been burned at antiwar rallies in the 1960s and '70s, the Supreme Court had avoided a direct ruling on whether the Government could prohibit such acts...