Word: ervin
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Although Cox reluctantly accepted the Ervin committee's decision, he was still trying at week's end to persuade Federal Judge John Sirica to ban the public from the hearings, or at least to ban TV and radio coverage of potential defendants like former White House Counsel John Dean. Since reporters would presumably still be admitted, the absence of TV cameras or radio microphones would hardly insulate the public from the proceedings...
Untidy Mix. As head of a Senate committee, Ervin has a constitutional right to press ahead, but his statement of the conflict between "the truth" and "sending one or two people to jail" seemed to concede Cox's point that the hearings might impair future legal proceedings. A concurring opinion came from Massachusetts Judge Paul Reardon, who drafted the A.B.A.'s free press-fair trial guidelines: "The Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the accused the right to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury, is going down the drain in this affair...
...distant, raised eye of the London Times, the untidy mix of prosecutors, press and Congress seemed almost to amount to "a lynching" of the President. A Times editorial scored Ervin's committee for publicizing hearsay, the Watergate grand jury for considering prejudicial evidence, and the newspapers (especially the New York Times and the Washington Post) for publishing leaks. It complained that much out of-court evidence, like that being offered by John Dean, was "not given under oath, not open to crossexamination" and is thus of a quality that "could hardly be less satisfactory. Yet on this evidence could...
...questions about his actions. No sooner was the matter broached late last month than a White House spokesman angrily declared that such summons would be rejected as "constitutionally inappropriate." Perhaps, but Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Wilson all agreed to appear before Senate groups to answer questions, and Senator Sam Ervin has wondered why such answers could not be compelled-at least in the proper circumstances. "If we were engaged in a war," he said, "and some judge in, say, Guam subpoenaed the President in a crap-shooting case or something, then I can see the high court overturning the subpoena...
...Ervin said he himself had no such present plans. But in a Supreme Court decision last June requiring reporters to testify before grand juries, Justice Byron White dropped a now much-referred-to quotation from Jeremy Bentham: "Were the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord High Chancellor to be passing by in the same coach while a chimney sweeper and a barrow-woman were in dispute about a halfpennyworth of apples, and the chimney sweeper or the barrow-woman were to think proper to call upon them for their evidence, could they refuse it? No, most...