Word: popkin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that Professor Samuel Popkin has been released from jail, it should be possible to offer some negative comments on the reasoning behind his defense without being in the position of kicking somebody while he is down. Certainly some negative comments are in order...
Professor Popkin's defense of his refusal to answer certain questions before a grand jury has been characterized as civil libertarian. The correct characterization seems to me to be elitist. Popkin and his lawyers did not argue that everyone should have the right to refuse to answer questions before a grand jury. They argued that "scholars" should have a special privilege...
Basically, Popkin is defending an elitist system of information control. The substance of his argument seems to be that there should be special people with special privileges who keep the public informed. How do such people get their positions? What if I don't trust any of them and want to collect my own information...
...only credit the genuine concern for justice and due process demonstrated by Bok and Steiner. But we abhor the fact that Popkin goes free only when the government sees fit to dismiss a grand jury which it had milked to the hilt...
...courts never supported Popkin's appeal, which was firmly grounded on First Amendment rights. Like so many others who have been felled this year by the government's malevolent attitude toward those rights, Popkin was subject to the whim of the government and its agents. He was jailed on a whim, and released on a whim. We cannot help but wonder what the future holds for the freedoms inherent in the First Amendment when the government holds and exercises unbridled powers to detain, harass and jail newsmen, scholars and other law-abiding citizens of this country...