Church or Jail

The charge against William J. Korpa in San Francisco Municipal Court was battery: he had beaten up two youths at a beach party. A husky 18-year-old with a stammer, Korpa had been in trouble with the police since he was 13, and his record, Judge Andrew J. Eyman felt, showed that "most of the usual avenues of rehabilitation had failed." Yet the court was reluctant to send the boy to jail, instead put him on two years' probation and added two conditions: 1) no drinking, and 2) attend church every Sunday.

Defendant Korpa had told the judge that he attended a Roman Catholic church, and to Baptist Eyman it seemed quite "normal and natural to tell the boy to go to church." But last week the American Civil Liberties Union was yelling foul. The spirit of the Constitution had been violated, said A.C.L.U.'s Northern California Director Ernest Besig, and he called upon the writings of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson for proof: "No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess, by word or act, their faith therein." The San Francisco Chronicle also held Eyman out of line, thought another judge might force a defendant to go to a church other than his own, or even require an atheist to go to church.

Judge Eyman retorted that he had not forced Korpa to do anything: "There was no obligation on the young man to accept the grace and clemency which I offered him. If he had not accepted the probation terms, he would have gone to jail. However, in accepting the offer of the court, he undertook to comply with the requirement to regularly attend his church. In my opinion, this was a reasonable requirement . . . I'm not a Catholic, but I would do this whether the boy was a Hindu, a Methodist or a Mormon."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.