Briar Patch
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"Well," as Andy Devine said, digging into another helping of beans and bread, "the meat at these things is usually raw anyway."
KIDS IN COURT
THE ANNALS OF LAW ARE abundant with names that mean very little to the layman. Even in celebrated cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education, it's unlikely that anyone would inquire about the person named Brown who eventually led the Supreme Court to order school desegregation. Perhaps that is as it should be since anonymity in such matters is generally a blessing.
For Alicia Morales that anonymity may temporarily be a thing of the past: The case of Morales vs. Turman began in U .S. Federal Court in Sherman, Texas late in June. It is, in some ways, as important a case as Brown.
Before her legal troubles began in early 1970, Alicia worked in a clothing factory in El Paso for $70 a week, $65 of which was promptly confiscated by her father. Alicia tried hiding the money from her parent, but one Friday he showed up at the factory, collected her weekly earnings and made such a rumpus that Alicia was fired.
Alicia refused to support her father any longer and went to live with a friend of her mother's. Her enraged father decided the girl must be punished. He signed in court an agreed judgment which put Alicia behind bars on February 27, 1970, at the Gainesville School for Girls under the authority of the Texas Youth Council. The charge made against her was "incorrigibility."
Fortunately for Alicia, her imprisonment came at a time when the incarceration of juveniles was under scrutiny by a couple of bright young lawyers. One was Steven Bercu, a U.T. law graduate whose interest in juvenile law began while he was a staff attorney at El Paso Legal Assistance Society. Bercu had already begun to suspect the scales of justice in the El Paso Area were slightly askew when it came to young people in trouble. For one thing, the then juvenile judge apparently made a habit of sending youths to prison without a hearing or the benefit of legal advice. The procedure was fairly simple. All a parent or adult had to do was sign an agreed judgment stating, for example, that a child was an "incorrigible." The judge added his signature and the child was committed to a state institution under the jurisdiction of the Texas Youth Council. Since the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1967 that juveniles had a right to counsel, and Texas affirmed that decision by statute in 1969, these practices were both unconstitutional and illegal.
Early in 1971, Bercu and his co-lawyer from Center, Bill Hoffman, went to the Gainesville School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas, armed with a discovery order which allowed them to talk to some of the inmates. Of the 18 girls they saw, six, including Alicia Morales, signed affidavits saying they'd been committed without hearings or lawyers and retained the two young men as their attorneys. A short time later at the Gatesville School for Boys six boys were added to the list of clients.
When the lawyers returned to Gainesville and attempted to talk to their six clients, they were told that no private conversation would be allowed, that a supervisor of the prison would have to be present. Despite phone calls to the director's office in Austin, they were unable to get that decision reversed. That same evening the two lawyers began a law suit which made two claims: (1) that state juvenile institutions had prevented their clients from communicating openly with their attorneys and (2) that Texas juvenile judges, as a group, used illegal courtroom practices and procedures in the incarceration of juveniles.
At 6 a.m. the next day, weary and worn from the night's labors, Bercu and Hoffman boarded a plane for Beaumont where they filed their complaint in the federal court and met the man who will preside during the trial in Sherman, Judge William Wayne Justice, whose reputation belies the old adage that there's nothing in a name. The case gained momentum due to admissions from several judges about the procedures used for committing youngsters to prisons. In Dallas County, Judge Ted Robertson stated that from January, 1967, until June, 1971, of the 1,220 children he had found delinquent, only 170 had lawyers. Judge Lewis Russell admitted that during the same period of the 3,513 boys and girls he had found delinquent, only 204 had lawyers. Judge Edwin Berliner from El Paso had committed 75 youths under 18 without a hearing and another 24 who had not had attorneys.
As a result of these revelations the Attorney General of Texas has been charged by the court with the responsibility of overseeing the proceedings in juvenile courts. He must report periodically on whether the proscriptions of the law are being followed.
In the meantime, Bercu, who had been joined on the case by another O.E.O.-funded lawyer named Peter Sandmann, had amended his plaintiff's case to declare that juveniles incarcerated by the Texas Youth Council had a right to rehabilitative treatment. The law has never precisely defined what rehabilitative treatment means, and it is this part of the suit that gives it national importance. Should such a definition obtain from the decision in Morales vs. Turman, almost every state in the union, including Texas, would have to change the way its juvenile detention centers are run to comply with the court's rulings. Philosophies of confinement and punishment for juveniles would have to be severely modified.
The suit also claims that the inmates were subjected to "oppressive, unhealthy and inhumane conditions." This generalized heading includes charges of insect-ridden food, frequent beatings, buckets in cells for human waste, inadequate medical treatment for inmates, the frequent use of control drugs such as Thorazine, and, except in the case of the modern school at Brownwood, drab, depressing facilities that bespeak an attitude of hopelessness and futility.
It is not as if these inmates were hardened criminals. Only 3 per cent of the girls and 5 per cent of the boys were committed for acts of violence. They are children from all ethnic groups, although the largest percentage is white. Many of them have shared the same misfortune of being unwanted at home and then sent away to a hard, often cruel existence inside old institutions run by outmoded methods.
It would be foolhardy to look to Morales vs. Turman for all the answers to these problems. But the law can sometimes point the way and even shed some light in dim and shadowy corners.
WHITHER BEN BARNES
HE LIVES, HE LIVES, ALTHOUGH his life style is muted somewhat. In Brownwood now he still spends many of his waking hours on the telephone in his office or car, reaching across those thin wires and air waves to keep himself in touch. Most of his dealings these days have to do with affairs of the Herman Bennett Co.—bargaining for shopping center projects, supervising construction, building and managing Holiday Inns, buying land. They are all affairs that have to do with making money. Until 1973 Ben Barnes' life was eaten up with money, but it was money designed to make his political life a continuing reality, to fuel his consuming political ego that at times seemed to be an entity with a life of its own.
Vestiges of his political habits remain. He still walks at the head of the group he is with, always in an abrupt, nervous hurry. In restaurants and airport lobbies strangers rush up to introduce themselves. "Haw yew," he says.
Behind him are a dozen years of hot and heavy politics, finding who needed what from whom and delivering, delivering. Barnes learned early that everyone wants something, and to each of them he gave enough that they wanted him to stay in the dealer's chair. But suddenly…
These days, instead of Frank Erwin stomping into Barnes' office to outline the latest political deal to get more money for the University of Texas, in comes Marion the Agrarian.
Marion the Agrarian was so named recently when he expounded, in the presence of Barnes and a hard-bitten urban reporter, on the values of rural life. Marion's pet theory holds that eventually everyone in the world will live in Texas, attend Texas A&M, and come to live in Brownwood. Barnes nods assent.
Because that is how Ben Barnes is today. Ben is living his life almost as if there were no political tomorrow. Sure, he'll try to cadge an occasional convention for the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and he still chats occasionally with folks like National Democratic Party Chairman Robert Strauss. But he doesn't talk openly about politics much, except in the way that Don Meredith might talk about football, or Stan Musial about baseball. Barnes is waiting, watching the sun, keeping those political legs in form by running on business trips to Kerrville and Houston and Dallas and New Orleans and Taos, N.M., doing business, meeting people—Haw Yew, Hah Yew.
He says he has no political ambition. Most politicians who have political ambition say they have no political ambition. The wise politicians who have no political ambition but wouldn't mind serving if the people called wait, then wait some more.
If the call comes, the response is ready. If it doesn't come…
Marion, what's that stuff again about the good rural life?
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