The Week

■ Our file on Making Government Work runneth over, and although none of the following suggestions carries a double-your-freedom-back guarantee, utopias have been founded on less. 1) Rethink women’s suffrage. 2) In capital cases, try the victims as well as the suspects; maybe they had it coming. 3) Simplify the fantastically cumbersome penal codes, providing for all felonies, first offense: death; second offense: ninety days; three-time losers: 25 cents fine and forfeiture of jail privileges. 4) Legislation Retirement Program: legislative surpluses having reached critical proportions, Members of Congress should be paid a bounty for every law they do not pass, at 90 per cent of parity. 5) Its moral bankruptcy being duly certified, the liberal Establishment should be placed in receivership and demoralized.

■ On the subject of crime, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in his State of the Judiciary address to the American Bar Association recalled that in 1906, Dean Roscoe Pound had predicted to the ABA convention that nineteenth-century judicial methods and machinery would be insufficient for the twentieth century. Justice Burger noted that the annual budget of the federal judiciary was a mere $128 million— $70 million less than the cost of a single C-5A aircraft— indicating our failure to heed Dean Pound’s admonitions. The main problem, said Justice Burger, is the evolution of new kinds of cases resulting from new federal laws and court decisions. Consider, in the latter category, the newly propounded rights of criminal defendants (remember Mapp, Escobedo, Miranda, Mallory, Gideon). Because of new procedural safeguards, a criminal trial now takes twice as long as it did in 1960. As Burger put it: “These changes represent a deliberate commitment—some by judicial decision and some by legislation—to values higher than pure efficiency when we are dealing with human liberty.” As for the part these changes play in the rising crime rate, Burger offers an interesting suggestion: “The most simple and the most obvious remedy is to give the courts the manpower and tools—including the prosecutors and defense lawyers—to try criminal cases within sixty days after indictment and let us see what happens. I predict it would sharply reduce the crime rate.”

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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■ Our file on Making Government Work runneth over, and although none of the following suggestions carries a double-your-freedom-back guarantee, utopias have been founded on less. 1) Rethink women’s suffrage. 2) In capital cases, try the victims as well as the suspects; maybe they had it coming. 3) Simplify the fantastically cumbersome penal codes, providing for all felonies, first offense: death; second offense: ninety days; three-time losers: 25 cents fine and forfeiture of jail privileges. 4) Legislation Retirement Program: legislative surpluses having reached critical proportions, Members of Congress should be paid a bounty for every law they do not pass, at 90 per cent of parity. 5) Its moral bankruptcy being duly certified, the liberal Establishment should be placed in receivership and demoralized.

■ On the subject of crime, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in his State of the Judiciary address to the American Bar Association recalled that in 1906, Dean Roscoe Pound had predicted to the ABA convention that nineteenth-century judicial methods and machinery would be insufficient for the twentieth century. Justice Burger noted that the annual budget of the federal judiciary was a mere $128 million— $70 million less than the cost of a single C-5A aircraft— indicating our failure to heed Dean Pound’s admonitions. The main problem, said Justice Burger, is the evolution of new kinds of cases resulting from new federal laws and court decisions. Consider, in the latter category, the newly propounded rights of criminal defendants (remember Mapp, Escobedo, Miranda, Mallory, Gideon). Because of new procedural safeguards, a criminal trial now takes twice as long as it did in 1960. As Burger put it: “These changes represent a deliberate commitment—some by judicial decision and some by legislation—to values higher than pure efficiency when we are dealing with human liberty.” As for the part these changes play in the rising crime rate, Burger offers an interesting suggestion: “The most simple and the most obvious remedy is to give the courts the manpower and tools—including the prosecutors and defense lawyers—to try criminal cases within sixty days after indictment and let us see what happens. I predict it would sharply reduce the crime rate.”