Crime Rulings

I wish to applaud you for your editorial “High Court’s Crime Offensive: In the End Who Will Be Hurt?” (Aug. 5). Over the past months I have become increasingly apprehensive about whether or not the Supreme Court is striking that balance between the need for social order and the protection of individual rights. The court seems to be forgoing the latter. The recent decisions of the court are nothing less than alarming, particularly the one that permits the police to throw anyone in jail for 48 hours without any warrant whatsoever. I am incensed over the remark made by Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote that “it is not so bad for an utterly innocent person to wait 48 hours in jail.” I would like to see him, an innocent man, thrown in a cell for 48 hours where he could be abused, beaten and robbed of all human dignity and then come out and say that “it wasn’t so bad.”

It scares me to think that the court has made it more likely that I could be victimized by the very institutions that were designed to protect me. If our individual rights are allowed to be compromised in the wake of increasing police power, how can we truly remain free?

CHARLES RODRIGUEZ

Los Angeles