YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: LAW-CRIME-AND-LAW-ENFORCEMENT: LAW

LAW: Court Decisions. During 1996 a number of important decisions concerning human rights were handed down by courts throughout the world. These cases may be classified in two major categories: (1) age, race, and sex discrimination; and (2) other civil rights. In United States v. Virginia the Supreme Court of the United States held that the admission policy of Virginia Military Institute (VMI) violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. VMI, a state-supported college, was founded and operated as an all-male institution with a mission of producing citizen-soldiers who were prepared for leadership in civilian and military life. Its educational program placed emphasis on physical rigour, absence of privacy, mental stress, and close regulation of personal behaviour. On the assumption that this program was incompatible with the abilities and special needs of women, VMI refused to matriculate females. The court ruled that no state-supported institution could discriminate in this way, and it held that Virginia's proposed remedy of establishing a separate women's institution to be run on parallel lines to that of VMI did not cure the constitutional violation. In Italy the Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional the electoral laws that established quotas for candidates based on sex. In those laws a percentage of candidate places were reserved for women only. The court said that such reservations were contrary to notions of equality and that sex must be treated as irrelevant when selecting candidates for election. In 1992 Colorado adopted a constitutional amendment prohibiting the state from enacting or enforcing any statute whereby homosexual orientation could entitle any person to quota preference or claim to minority or protected status. In 1996, however, the U.S. Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans held that this amendment violated the equal protection clause of the federal constitution. The court maintained that the Colorado amendment put homosexuals in a solitary class and denied them, and only them, specific legal protection. The Italian Constitutional Court struck down as unconstitutional a provision in the Criminal Code providing for a compulsory postponement of the incarceration of any person affected by HIV, the virus associated with AIDS. The code rule was based on the idea that jail detention of individuals having AIDS was incompatible with that person's health and, perhaps more important, with the safety of other prisoners. The court said that though these concerns had merit, the judge should not be barred from imposing a prison sentence in all cases involving persons with HIV but should be free to consider each case on its merits. In the U.S. the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are allocated among the states in accordance with population, and, therefore, the census taken every 10 years is a matter of major importance to the body politic. When a state's population becomes relatively greater or smaller, it will gain or lose a seat or seats in the House, and this calls for it to reapportion its congressional districts. Two major cases involving these phenomena as a result of the 1990 census came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. Wisconsin v. City of New York involved the charge that the 1990 census had undercounted the population of the state of New York by not including some individuals, essentially members of certain minority groups. This undercount, it was alleged, benefited the state of Wisconsin. The U.S. secretary of commerce, to whom matters involving the census have been delegated, refused to employ any method of statistical adjustment to change the count. The Supreme Court sustained his decision, stating that it was consonant with the text and history of the federal constitution. Because of the 1990 census, North Carolina was required to reapportion its congressional districts. In doing so, it established a district in which the majority of residents were African-Americans. This district, highly irregular in shape and geographically noncompact, was designed to give African-Americans voting strength and possibly assure them a "safe" seat in the House of Representatives. In Shaw v. Hunt the Supreme Court declared that the redistricting plan violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. In Bush v. Vera a similar fate befell the state of Texas in its efforts to give African-Americans and Hispanics assured voting strength. Several cases in 1996 involved the death penalty. In Reckley v. Minister of Public Safety, the Privy Council held that under the constitution of The Bahamas the exercise of the prerogative of mercy could not be challenged legally. The person sentenced to death has no voice in determining whether the minister of public safety will invoke, or not invoke, his discretion as to whether the death sentence should be carried out. In the U.S. a federal appellate court held in Fierro v. Gomez that the use of cyanide gas to carry out a death sentence imposes cruel and unusual punishment on the prisoner in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the federal constitution. In this connection the court found that the pain caused by cyanide gas is intense and continues for several minutes. The U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. The United States sustained the power of the president to prescribe the factors to be taken into account for a court-martial to sentence a member of the armed forces to death. The contention, which the court rejected, was that only Congress had that authority. Many countries had by 1996 enacted forfeiture laws, largely to deter the smuggling of drugs and to make that business less profitable. Under these laws the vehicle used for the illegal activity could be seized and forfeited to the state. Legal questions arising from the use of these laws usually involved a determination of the property that could be seized and the rights of innocent co-owners of that property. These questions arose in two cases during the year. The first, from Canada, Joys v. Minister of National Revenue, concerned the seizure and forfeiture of a fishing boat that had been used to smuggle narcotics and of the fishing license required for using the vessel to fish. The court held that the boat could be legally seized and forfeited but that the fishing license could not. The court opined that the license was necessary to fish but not to smuggle and that it, therefore, had an insufficient relationship to that activity to permit forfeiture. The second case, from the U.S., Bennis v. Michigan, did not involve drugs but concerned the forfeiture as a public nuisance of an automobile used by its co-owner as the site of assignation with a prostitute. The wife of the guilty party was the co-owner of the automobile and asserted that her interest in the car should not be seized because of her lack of knowledge that her husband would use it to violate the state's indecency laws. In spite of this assertion, the Michigan court held that her interest could be seized legally without compensation. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a sharply divided opinion, affirmed this ruling. Conceptually, a state's taking of property as a direct or indirect result of legislation or administrative regulation is a form of forfeiture, but in many countries it requires the state to compensate the owner for any loss. This matter arose in France during the year. An appropriate administrator refused to allow the owner of a van Gogh painting to remove it from France for the purpose of selling it abroad. The ruling was predicated on the ground that the painting was a historic monument, which the owner denied. The Cour de Cassation ruled the administrator had the authority to prohibit the exportation of the painting but decreed that the owner was to be compensated for his loss. The loss, in this regard, was the difference between the price he could obtain in France and the price he could reasonably expect to receive on the international market. In Goodwin v. United Kingdom the European Court of Human Rights handed down an important decision under Article 10(1) of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression. The case involved a British journalist, William Goodwin, who was called by an informant and given unsolicited information about the finances of a certain company. Goodwin proposed to publish the information and called the company in question, asking it to verify the correctness of his proposed draft and to offer comments about it. The company immediately sought and obtained an injunction prohibiting the publication of the draft and a ruling requiring Goodwin to reveal his sources. Pursuant to the injunction, Goodwin did not publish the article, but he refused to reveal the source of his information and was fined 5,000 for contempt. He then filed a complaint with the European Commission of Human Rights on the grounds that his freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 10 had been abridged. The Court of Human Rights agreed in part. It ruled that the injunction against publication was properly within the discretion of the English court but that its additional disclosure order went too far. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Jaffee v. Redmond that confidential communications between a patient and a psychotherapist, including a licensed social worker, in the course of psychotherapy were privileged and could not be required to be disclosed. In a dissent Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that the majority of the court had concentrated only on the benefit that would be achieved by the creation of the evidentiary privilege, namely the encouragement of psychotherapeutic counseling. "It has not mentioned the purchase price: occasional injustice. That is the cost of every rule which excludes reliable and probative evidence." The Supreme Court of Canada, in R. v. O'Connor, seemed to take the same position as Justice Scalia, at least in a criminal case. The case involved the effort of a person charged with sexual assault to obtain the medical and psychological records of the victim. In a 5-4 decision the majority held that it was necessary for the accused to have these records in order to ensure a fair trial. The minority expressed concerns about the privacy of the victim. Almost echoing Justice Scalia, the majority said those concerns were too great a price to pay when the criminal liability of the accused was at stake. Priority must be given to the right of the accused to a fair trial. The Federal Court of Canada ruled that certain applications of the Canadian Immigration Act violated freedom of association guaranteed by section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights. The case, Yamani v. Canada, involved an effort to exclude a Palestinian, Yamani, because of his membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an association that engaged in both violent and nonviolent activities. There was no evidence that Yamani was personally involved in the functions of the PFLP or was a danger to the lives or safety of persons in Canada. Under these circumstances, an order excluding him violated his right to freedom of association. (WILLIAM D. HAWKLAND) See also World Affairs: Multinational and Regional Organizations; United Nations. This updates the articles constitutional law; international law.