Law Thaw

When an English or U. S. citizen is jailed, his lawyer gets a piece of paper from a judge and shows it to the police who are then bound to yield their prisoner for a hearing before a magistrate on the charges and evidence' against the prisoner, or straightway release him. Long before the Magna Charta (1215) Anglo-Saxons wrested from king and barons the freeman's right to that piece of paper. It was, and is, called a writ of habeas corpus ("you may have the body"). It is issued on the theory that a man is innocent until the state has proved him guilty of a crime.

But in France, since Visigoths vanished into the sixth century donjons of Clovis, a French suspect was looked on as guilty until proved innocent. Hence, by neat Gallic logic, he must be locked up until the state gets around to trying him. Last week French criminal procedure was quietly revolutionized with a new law providing that henceforth all arrested suspects must be provisionally released within five days unless 1) convicted, 2) proved vagrants, or 3) accused of a crime punishable by a term of more than two years. Appalled were police, prosecutors and feudal-minded deputies of the Right; jubilant was the League for the Rights of Man which had lobbied the bill through Parliament; more jubilant were 500 Frenchmen released like roaches in a thaw from Sante Fresnes and Petite Roquette prisons in Paris and hundreds more from provincial prisons.

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