Circumstances of Pressure

William Earl Fikes is a 30-year-old Alabama Negro under sentence of death for burglary with intent to rape the daughter of Selma, Ala.'s mayor in 1953. When Alabama's highest court upheld the decision, his lawyers brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on the ground that Fikes had been denied due process before and during his trial. After his arrest, they argued, Fikes had first been lodged in a local jail, then whisked away to a state prison, where he was held incommunicado for more than a week--during which state officers obtained two confessions that later provided the basis for his conviction. Although the lawyers were unable to prove physical brutality, they declared that the prisoner's mental background--three psychiatrists had attested to the fact that Fikes was schizophrenic, or, as his mother had put it at the trial, "thick-headed"--made him highly susceptible to psychological coercion, which the state had undoubtedly used in getting him to confess in violation of his rights under the 14th Amendment.

Over the justice of this estimate the Supreme Court clashed headlong last week. Wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren for the 6-3 majority which set aside the Alabama decision: "The circumstances of pressure applied against the power of resistance of this petitioner, who cannot be deemed other than weak of will or mind, deprived him of due process of law." From Justice John Marshall Harlan (joined by Stanley Reed and Harold Burton) came a vigorous dissent. The gist: not only was there no physical coercion but "psychological coercion is by no means manifest"; on the basis of the record, the state authorities did nothing more serious in their handling of the case than "offend some fastidious squeamishness or private sentimentalism about combating crime too energetically." In any case, wrote Harlan, since reasonable men could differ on whether Fikes's constitutional rights had been violated, "due regard for the division between state and federal functions in the administration of criminal justice requires that we let Alabama's judgment stand."

The net effect of the decision was to return the Fikes case to the Alabama courts for retrial--this time without use of the tainted confessions. More important was the overall effect: once again, and this time by a split decision, the court had inflamed the suspicions of critics who hold that too many of its recent decisions are anchored more in sociology than in the solid substance of the law.

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