Significant Silence

In some ways, the Supreme Court's most important work is deciding when not to decide. Last year the court accepted only 3% of the 4,202 cases that came before it; this year that rate may decrease partly because Chief Justice Burger feels that he and his colleagues are too overwhelmed to consider anything but the most crucial issues. Even so, many rejected cases also raise significant questions. Although the court almost never explains its reasons, court watchers find that rejections sometimes imply significant answers. Last week, as the court settled into its new term, three such turndowns seemed especially interesting:

> Just before becoming 16, Rudy Rios was tried in Texas for smashing a car window. Repairing the damage cost $7.88, but the juvenile court authorized his confinement in reform school for up to five years. Had he been tried at age 17 as an adult, the maximum penalty would have been a year in prison or a $1,000 fine. The question his lawyers had hoped the court would settle was whether or not Rudy had been deprived of his 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the law and his Eighth Amendment right not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment. If nothing else, the court's silence leaves intact a dubious juvenile-law procedure in Texas.

> After being convicted of selling marijuana, Los Angeles Butcher Joe Perkins appealed to the court to strike down the California anti-pot law on the grounds, among others, that marijuana belongs in "a zone of mental or sensory privacy" that the state cannot properly invade. With the failure of the court to hear his pot protestations, Perkins will have to serve his five-year-to-life sentence.

> As part of their rock-group image, Michael Jackson and Barry Barnes wore long hair, sideburns and mustaches. Authorities at their Nashville, Tenn., high school did not dig the getup and suspended the boys. Arguing that the hair was necessary to their musical careers and in any case was protected by the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee, Jackson and Barnes went to court. But neither trial nor appeals judges were turned on by the musicians' plaint. Last week the Supreme Court also turned a deaf ear; so the school's long-hair ban stands. Four months ago, however, the court refused to review a Wisconsin decision that struck down a high school long-hair ban (TIME, June 15). The conclusion seems to be that the court does not care about hair, short or long.

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