THE LAW: 14 Magic Words

In 1637. at a time when theological disagreement was equated with political revolution, a contentious English gentleman named John Lilburne was brought before King Charles I's Star Chamber, accused of circulating Puritan writings. The Star Chamber, originally a reputable judicial council, had become a fierce and single-minded tribunal, given to extracting confessions by torture. Lilburne refused to take the chamber's normal oath of testimony, on the ground that no man was bound to incriminate himself. Although he was whipped, fined and jailed, his stand made him a popular hero.-

In 1950, a fierce and single-minded U.S. Communist named Patricia Blau appealed her conviction for refusing to answer the questions of a Denver grand jury about her Communist affiliations. She pleaded that no witness before any U.S. judicial or investigative body was bound to incriminate himself in his testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Mrs.

Blau and reversed her conviction (TIME, Dec. 25, 1950). She was saved by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "No person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."

By her release Mrs. Blau pointed the way to the wider use of this principle, by U.S. Communists and their friends. Since the day the Supreme Court decided that her refusal to answer was legal, a stream of Communists and people with Communist associations have faced down courts, grand juries and congressional committees with what Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. calls "those 14 magic words": "I refuse to answer upon the ground that it might tend to incriminate me."-

Last August, Mrs. Blau further dramatized the consequences of evading justice through the Fifth Amendment when she was arrested in California as a key accomplice of two U.S. Communist fugitives (TIME, Sept. 7). This was the last straw for Attorney General Brownell. He set his Department of Justice lawyers looking for a way to limit the abuse of the 14 magic words without damaging the solid legal right behind them. Last week Brownell announced the results of their study: a proposal to compel the testimony of witnesses by giving them immunity from federal prosecution.

The Two Immunities. Brownell made his proposal, in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, as the climax of a review of Fifth Amendment procedures. He spoke carefully (mimeographed copies of his speech included 44 legal and historical footnotes), in the tones of a lawyer addressing an intelligent and interested audience. He made it clear that only "the critical situation of our time" had forced him to seek a sharper definition of a basic constitutional right.

Brownell proposes to take one immunity away from the witness by giving him another. Congress would give the Attorney General the power to declare that a certain witness would never be prosecuted for a crime that he disclosed or told about OR a federal witness stand.

Brownell's plan would work this way:

1) Witness refuses to answer on the ground of possible selfincrimination;