UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
Act favors bigger vote
Help may be on the way for all those either unable or unwilling to leave their homes to register to vote.
That help is coming in the form of a bill before a committee of the Kansas House. The bill would allow door-to-door distribution of voter registration forms, enabling eligible voters to register without leaving their living rooms.
The bill has the support of the Associated Students of Kansas, which also supported a similar measure that was defeated last year. ASK, apparently on the assumption that students are either too busy, too immobile or too apathetic to leave their homes to register, is hoping the bill would increase the number of students registered to vote.
OF COURSE, the bill would without doubt be a great help to elderly and fixed-income persons who are unable to find transportation or leave their homes to register.
In the past registration was a requirement for voting only in the most populous areas of Kansas. But in 1972 registration was made a requirement for voting in primaries and general elections in all parts of the state.
The adoption of a reliable method of national voter registration has been a goal of the Carter administration since it took office, and the Kansas bill would be an important first step toward making the right of voting more accessible to everyone.
But partisan politics should play no role in debate on the bill. The principle of increased public participation in government should be a bipartisan goal, and the easiest way to ensure that increased public participation is to increase the number of citizens eligible to vote.
There has been no evidence to suggest that the bill would increase fraudulent registrations. Instead, the new bill would be a boon to the entire electoral process in Kansas, and should receive the support of all members of the legislature, regardless of party loyalty.
AS COULD be expected, Democrats have so far been the biggest supporters of the bill, reasoning that the groups most likely to be helped by the plan, the young and the elderly, are also the groups that are most likely to vote a Democratic ticket.
Free speech advocates should consider others
To the editor:
Far be it for me to advocate any curtailment of academic freedom or freedom of speech, but I must voice an objection to the act of neglecting concerning the efficacy of Nazis' peremptory
I understand their objection to the post-
pension of that exhibit and in theory, I
think it is a mistake.
However, this case has certain human considerations that must influence any armchair philosophizing on rights of speech or action. I refer to plain, old-fashioned thoughtfulness and consideration for the feelings of your fellows.
So try to empathize, then, how I am faced with the incomprehensibility of a senseless slaughter of 1.5 million children, and 4.5 million children. This was the loss of an entire civilization.
The crimes against my people—unparalleled in human history—have left unversable scars in my heart and mind, which is a feeling shared by others. The victims were wrote that the devil himself had not devised a fitting revenge for the death of one child.
I'm sure that as thinking men and women, AUAP members have studied the Holocaust and have learned to understand the pain this exhibit holds for me. I do not ask that you aid a violation of your academic rights—only that you remember the suffering, address and compassion for another's tragedy.
These opinions are my own and not necessary that of any organization I am associated with.
Judith Paltin
Hillel chairman
Director's inspection would reveal blame
To the editor:
If the director of Facilities Operations were aware of dissension in the steamfitter's shop, perhaps he could have prevented all the controversy that has resulted in the fire.
Did he check as to why Brouhard wanted
o transfer to the plumbing shop (without an increase in pay), after having been in the itemfitters' shop for 17 years? As a good and just director, he should have not just changed his job, but between Brouhard and his supervisor, with the fault belonging solely to Brouhard.
I would think he would have checked all avenues, to ensure that his conclusions were correct. This could have been done by having the staff member buy the *steamifier's* shop, as well as employees in other shops and their supervisors. Also, he could have checked with some of the past employees, who have either it or transferred from the steamifier's shop, as to why they
If he has already done this and still feels that Brouhard is completely to blame, with no burden of guilt on his supervisor, then he should have his conscience should be perfectly clear.
Evelyn Goodrich
Evelyn Gooden University account clerk
Kansas doesn't need death penalty dagger
To the editor
In my first two years at KU I was cautious not to interfere in any way with matters that the court has decided. In the case of death penalty, I would like to voice my opinion in defense of achievements that are welcome worldwide, and the suppression of the death penalty is one of
It is the view of most people today that there is something wrong with a society that resorts to such methods in order to dissuade a person from crime. Kansas doesn't need a sinister dagger looming over it. It can be the police who are clean and fine as Eisenhower was.
Santiago Hevia
Ouijedo, Spain graduate student
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sharply between varying degrees of brutality and other mitigating circumstances, a recent bill introduced in the House may also work to堤 up rapa laws.
State Sen. Paul Hess, R-Wichita, introduced a bill last week that would eliminate the crime of rape and replace it with a law that will penalize individuals for different elements and different penalties.
The measure would establish the crimes of criminal sexual penetration of the first, second and third degree, ranging from Class A to Class C felonies, and also the crime of criminal sexual contact in the third and fourth degree which would be Class C and Class D felonies.
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In addition, two Kansas City women were victims of assault last winter, but the county prosecutor's office has declined to file charges.
Three judges have drawn national attention in the past two years after they dismissed rape-related charges while commenting that women may encourage rape. One of the two judges was recalled, and movements are beginning to recall the other.
Rape laws need strict enforcement
One of the judges under pressure of recall dismissed a charge of attempted rape in mid-January, reportedly saying that, “if you are guilty of the law, they should not be trailing taverns.”
In issuing his verdict, Judge Hermann F. Busse of Fort Wayne, Ind., compared women visiting bars to meet men with, trying, to get a fish on the end of a book "
An increase in that kind of thinking on the part of judges could affect millions of American women who find a beer at a local bar or restaurant, or to one in the seclusion of one's kitchen.
Because all rape currently falls under one broad heading and is a Class C felony, it is often hard to press charges against a rape offender. Hess's bill is the direction that other states should take, not only because it will make rape easier to prosecute, but also because the cognize the seriousness of the crime and the fact that rape is not caused by the victim.
"IT'S LIKE baiting a hook and trying to walk away from it." he said.
General Manager Rick Musser
These actions seem to point to an alarming trend toward the erasing of attitudes concerning the violent crime of rape, and an alarmingly, toward the easing of race laws.
Rape victims are already so intimidated that a large percentage of the crimes go unreported. A move toward a relaxed view will only inflict more injury on those victims.
Mary Ernst
Stephen Morse, a University of Southern
Indeed, rape victims have not only had to submit themselves to harrowing cross-examinations about their moral uprightness, but they also have had to fight to the assistance of law enforcement agencies and the legal system.
California law professor, called the practice of placing emphasis on the mitigating circumstances in a rape case "victim-blaming." Victim-blaming, he said, was excusing an appalling lack of self-control in what is seen as sexually provocative.
Often the criminal is released without any punishment. In the Kansas City incidents, police mistakes in investigating the raps was the reason given for the county prosecutor not filing charges. Yet there has been a growing number of others familiar with the cases that the mistakes would not have occurred if rape were considered more serious of a crime.
Rape is a violent crime. It should never be excused.
Values must be changing. It's been a while since rape would be considered a normal reaction by a 19-year-old boy to a 16-year-old girl. The same reaction in the stairwell of a Madison high school.
Indeed, who would claim a murder victim was at fault because he was walking alone at night with large sums of money in a dangerous part of town? Surely the man must have known the consequences of such action and would have expected such an ending.
HOWEVER, despite the move by some judges to distinguish more and more
CONCERNED WOMEN, and men, are seeing the logic of such an argument is equally illogical when applied to rape cases. In September 1977, Dane County Judge Archie Simpson of Madison, Wis., was removed from the bench in a recall election. He was accused of sexual assault during a May 1977 hearing involving a 15-year-old boy who pleaded no contest to the second-degree sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl in a school starwell.
Simpson had said women should "stop teasing" by restoring moderate attire. "Whether women like it or not, they are objects. Are we supposed to take an imputation of our own age and punish that person severely because they react to it normally?" he said.
FOR YEARS women have been working to dispel myths about rape, and judges Busse and Simpson, along with a third in Utah, have undone one bit of that work.
Bill threatens judicial independence
By IRVING R. KAUFMAN
N. Y. Times Feature
NEW YORK—Increasingly, newspapers have been making news as well as reporting it. From a police search of the Stanford Daily to the citation of the New York Times for contempt of court, journalists have been in the public eye as never before.
The battlefront over free expression has extended beyond the bounds of the Bill of Rights, reflecting an affirmative concern that, reflecting the technical limits of his First Amendment freedoms, the journalist is harmed by his profession must not be hampered.
THE HEART of judicial independence is individualism. For the law to grow and develop, it must be based on individuality.
For this reason, judicial independence, like free expression, is crucial—and vulnerable—in times of tension and intolerance. It is imperative, therefore, that the lines protecting federal judges be inviolable if our society is to fulfill the promise embazoned above the portals of the Supreme Court: "Equal Justice Under Law" teaches us that a precondition for judicial independence is secure tenure.
Thus, the crucial issue in the Myron Farber case was interpretation of New Jersey's shield law, enacted to allow a school district to sue his sources. And the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Zarcher vs. Stanford Daily, upholding the search of a newsroom by law enforcement authorities, allowed left the door open for legislative action.
THIS ATTENTION on insulating the press from official harrassment brings sharply into view the importance of another fundamental American institution, the federal judiciary. Different as the press and the federal judiciary are, they share one distinctive characteristic: Both sustain democracy not because they are responsible to any branch of government but precisely because they are accountable for them; they are not accountable at all. Thus they are able to check the irresponsibility of those in power.
previously in disfair, and often the groundwork is laid by dissenting judges. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated it well when he declared that, "time has upset many fighting faiths." The wisdom of today may not be that of tomorrow.
Recently, I wrote that, "the lifeblood of the editorial process is human judgment." Clearly these words are equally true of judges. The judicial function must be performed by individuals, not cogs in a vast machine. And yet, today there looms an omnious threat to the tenure, and thus the independence, of our federal judges.
the ephemiistically named Judicia Tenure Bill passed the Senate last September and is certain to be reconsidered in the 96th Congress. Establishing a multitiered bureaucracy based in Washington, the bill would empower a special commission and court to remove federal judges from office.
OUR NATION'S founders did all within their power to prevent the tenure of federal judges from being aborted in this manner. Determined that abuses of the judiciary such as those perpetrated by George III would not be tolerated in the new republic, they established in Article III of the Constitution a judiciality of unprecedented inc
dependence, bolstered by the assurance of secure tenure.
Of course, the constitutional draftsmans did not make the grant absolute. A federal judge can be removed from office for "high Crimes and Midmeisterens," but only upon impeachment by the house and conviction by the Senate.
For nearly two centuries this has beet the only means by which disgraced judges have been outseted from the federal bench. And recent historical research makes it clear that the fraternity intended impeachment to be the exclusive method of judicial removal.
FURTHERMORE, the Judicial Tenure Bill appears both unnecessary and dangerous. The problem of the unfit or misrepeat federal judge is not nearly as great as is sometimes alleged. Federal judges have not suddenly fallen into collective dotage or indulged in a binge of bad behavior.
Any procedure short of impeachment that would guarantee the removal of the rare unfit judge would inevitably also threaten the disasters who, although they may be accustomed with the public and with their colleagues, render useful, innovative service.
UNDER THE Judicial Tenure Bill, a judge could be removed, without resorting to impeachment procedures, for, "conduct prejudice to the court," and having the judicial office into disrepute." It requires little imagination to foresee the harassment courageous judges such as William O. Douglas or Frank Pace, who might suffer under so malleable a standard.
The protections of judges' tenure have not been erected for the sake of those who wear the robes but to safeguard the sacred responsibility of insuring justice for all people in opposing the province of arrest, in or out of government, to undermine or dilute that independence. As with the journalist, then, so with the federal judge. We must not tamper with the working conditions of our judges by "hearse" pressure" to thrive. Fear of punishment must not chill their independence.
Irving R. Kraulman is chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. This article is adapted from his recent Benjamin R. Cardozo lecture delivered to the Association of the Bar of New York City.
STATE U.
CANCELLOR STONE WALL,
AN ANGRY ALUMI IS ON
THE PHONE, SHE INSISTS
WE CAN CLEAR NEXT WEEKS
ART EXHIBIT ON
BILITY
FETISHES.
EXEC, SEC., INFORM
HER THAT WE WILL NOT
BE PICTURED TO. STATE
I. IS AN INSTITUTIONEH
ON FREE SPEECH AND
OPEN-MINDNESS!
CHANCELLOR, THE ALUM
IN QUESTION IS MRS.
EXPENDER/
THE ONE WHO GAVE
US 3 MILLION
DOLLARS, LATT
VEAR?
BY T. M. ASLA
YESSIR.
TELL THE STUDENTS TO TOUGH IT!