Word: frankels
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From their early crusades against pollution, environmentalists have rapidly expanded the scope of their activities to tackle such issues as land use and energy policy. Now the courts have gone a step further by including declining rail service on the list of environmental concerns. Federal District Judge Marvin E. Frankel has ruled that the Interstate Commerce Commission cannot allow abandonment of any railroad service without showing that such an action does not "significantly affect the quality of the human environment...
...gauge of how relations between the White House and the press have changed comes in a reminiscence by Max Frankel, who recently left the New York Times Washington bureau to become the paper's Sunday editor. Writing in the Columbia Forum, Frankel recalls that during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, John Kennedy personally requested that the Times temporarily withhold exclusive information. His reason: if the Russians discovered prematurely how much the U.S. knew about their installations in Cuba, they would "take some action -like activating the missiles -and force him to attack." The request seemed reasonable. The previous...
...begin at the elementary beginning," writes Frankel, legislators do not really tell judges the objectives of punishing or what the punishment should be. Thus judges typically have only broad guidelines: "not more than 25 years"; "from five years to life." In theory, says Frankel, this is supposed to give judges necessary leeway to fit the punishment to the offender, not merely to the crime. In fact, however, it allows "sentences to be 'individualized' not so much in terms of defendants, but mainly in terms of the wide spectrums of character, bias, neurosis and daily vagary encountered among occupants...
...Frankel complains that judges will spend days considering lengthily briefed points of law but rarely devote more than an hour to deciding a man's sentence. "My point is that there is rarely, if ever, much to take longer about," he says. "There are virtually no rules or tests or standards-and thus no issues to resolve. The judgment is swift because the process of reaching it is not reflective or orderly...
...officials more closely familiar with prisoners, for instance parole authorities. Indeed California and a few other states have adopted a so-called "indeterminate sentencing" policy under which an offender stays in jail for as long or as short a time as penal officials think necessary for rehabilitation. Frankel thinks that this much-touted liberal reform amounts merely to passing the power of abuse along. Besides, he notes, the hard truth is that there is no successful prison rehabilitation to speak...