Griswold Lauds Amendment As 'Investigation Safeguard'

Legislative committees have "thrown out the window nearly every safeguard which has been developed over the centuries by our courts," Law School Dean Erwin N. Griswold told the Connecticut Bar Association yesterday. Thus, "instead of decrying the Fifth Amendment we may well feel satisfaction at the protection the Amendment has given to individual standing alone," he said in the Hartford address.

While our courts "are for the most part well run," Griswold continued. "We are told that a legislative committee is not a court, and that court rules do not apply," But risks are nonetheless very great in such investigations, and thus, "even greater safeguards should be imposed."

Griswold admitted that most legislators are "thoroughly conscientious and competent citizens." But all legislators are of necessity involved in politics, he pointed out. While "politics is surely one of the most important activities in a democracy," those involved in the activity are naturally concerned with attracting voters.

Amendment Said Moral Symbol

There have been unfortunate examples that investigations can be quite unsatisfactory, he said, citing a Senate committee report dealing with "a member" of the Senate.

To the harrassed witness, who has no confidence in the committee before which he is testifying, there is only one recourse, the Fifth Amendment. Griswold described it as "very nearly a lone sure rock in a time of storm. . . . It has . . . been a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us, when otherwise, there was a good deal of wavering under the pressure of the times."

He emphasized that, he did not consider every witness who used the amendment as "lily white." In fact, he added, "many of them are surely quite black." But at the same time, Griswold noted that there are not only two alternative reasons for use of the amendment--guilt or lie.

While he himself believes that witnesses should testify candidly, Griswold said, "It is easier to wish that someone else would be a martyr, than it is to be one yourself. And the point here is that . . . the privilege may be claimed without the person having in fact done anything criminal at all."

The witness is frightened, Griswold said, "by the TV cameras and lights, by the noise and confusion, and especially by the excesses which he sees before him . . . In this situation, he takes refuge in the Fifth Amendment."

Because of such action, witnesses have been called Fifth Amendment communists, leading "the less-thinking portions of the general public to conclude . . . that they are conspiratorial treasonous communists, when there may be no evidence that they are communists at all."

"Communists" Methods Rapped

The Law Dean went on to attack those who used the cumbersome expression "anti-anti-communists." To believe, as the expression infers, that any anti-communist must inso facto not only be good but beyond any sort of criticism. . . is surely un-American." To adopt methods which are essentially communistic will gain us nothing in our fight against communism, he continued.

"Hitler was an anti-communist . . . and a great many loyal Americans were opposed to Hitler and what he stood for. . . . I am opposed to the methods used by some other anti-communists," Griswold said.

The Fifth Amendment needs no defense, he told the Bar group, but if it did, "a good way to make it would be to use it, in a sense, offensively." He outlined five points where "the safeguarding of individual rights and liberties . . . seem to leave much to be desired."

These included violations of civil rights by police in so-called "third-degree" cases, and loose statements to the press by prosecuting officers. Griswold also attacked "unbridled publicity" about criminal cases before and after trials and the undiscriminating use of secret information and informers. He called for assistance to the many defendants in criminal cases unable to retain competent legal aid