AMERICAN NOTES: Reason Is the Victim

• Share

Perhaps no other incident better symbolizes the division of American thought and feeling about the Attica tragedy than a dedication ceremony held last week for Georgetown University's new law center, a few blocks from the Supreme Court building. The guest speaker was Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Preceding him, Alfred F. Ross, president of Georgetown's student bar association, reflected the somber mood of Burger's audience by making an impassioned reference to the prison riot and its aftermath. "What happened at Attica," he said, "was not merely a senseless and brutal massacre of men whose lives had already been unspeakably mutilated and wasted. What we witnessed was but the latest and least equivocal manifestation, for all the world to see with horror, that what we call our system of criminal justice has broken down completely; that in the name of justice, inhumanity and injustice permeate the treatment of those convicted of crime."

Burger rose impassively to deliver a sober and reflective speech. Where Ross had spoken of "human beings" locked in prisons, the Chief Justice—without specific reference to Attica—described convicts as the "delinquents and misfits" of society. He cautioned the students that law was not the path to social reform, although he admitted to being intrigued by the "alluring prospect that our world can be changed in the courts" rather than by legislators. It was a moderate enough speech by a man who cares deeply about prison reform, but the students were not in a frame of mind for moderation. Many of them walked out to listen to Radical Attorney William Kunstler in a street counterceremony.