Hinckley trial opens

Of course something will have to be said about topic A and at the end I expect to say it, but for the first time in three weeks, the 50 million Americans who sit down every evening to watch the half-hour news on the three television networks, for the first time some other topic than the Falklands led the programmes.

Not, I think, because people are getting bored – which they don't seem to be. In fact, one old newsman said there was a kind of guilty excitement about covering the story which he couldn't match in his memory since the first two years of the Second World War when America was not yet in it and when, therefore, American correspondents were free to roam and report both inside Britain and inside Nazi Germany and from all the battlefronts. Whereas, once we all know, once your own country gets into a war, the reporting from the enemy side is sketchy or lurid or full of grand rumours.

On the contrary, we've had nightly reports, obviously, from London and Washington but also from men aboard the task force, from Buenos Aires, from the Falklands with the Argentine soldiers, from men being trained in Argentina, from residents of the islands, some of whom say they don't trust an Argentine beyond the butt of his gun and others who say they've been treated correctly.

Not least, we keep looking at and hearing, with a wild surmise, that weird colony or compound in Buenos Aires of what they call Buenos Anglos, the British or Argentines of British stock. Not expatriates – most of them have been there for four or five generation. But like expatriates, the farther they get from the homeland, the more true-blue they become.

I recall a family born and brought up in Nairobi who in the 1960s sounded as if they'd been personally exported from Britain by P. G. Wodehouse. At a time when Englishmen were saying they were 'with it'' or 'hanging tough' and they would soon begin to say they were 'into' rock and would ask, 'What's the scam?', these unconquerable Britons in East Africa were talking about 'cads and bounders' and finding everything that pleased them either 'ripping' or 'top-hole'.

From what we've seen and heard of the Buenos Anglos in Argentina, the Wodehouse/ Ian Hay/ Dornford Yates tradition is alive and well. The men dress like English businessmen of the 1930s, they lunch at the London Grill, at weekends at the Hurlingham, the women play bridge and shop at Harrods and plan fund-raising balls for the British hospital, their children wear blue blazers and go to school at St Andrew's and St George's. They all take, in the morning, the English-language Buenos Aires Herald.

There've been some bomb threats here and there but, at the moment, anyway, an uneasy calm rides the even tenor of their ceremonial life. A way out for most of them was suggested by the reflection of an Anglo doctor who said, 'Many civilised people felt a repugnance for the Argentine invasion of the islands, to many it was clear that the junta was using it to cover up its terrible domestic travails. But, at the same time, the British invasion of South Georgia is abhorrent.'

There are said to be 70,000 Anglos in Argentina and it looks as if, for the first time in their lives, they were going to have to make a choice between divided loyalties, which most of us never have to make.

Well, once South Georgia was taken – though as I talk the official Argentine bulletins report heroic resistance there – the Falklands dropped to number three or four on the evening news menu and the surrender of the Sinai came up first, or the strenuous and failing efforts of the president and the party leaders in Congress to come up with a compromised budget.

There was one dazzling evening when the first item was the astonishing one that the whole range of consumer prices had dropped for the first time since 1953 and that, for the first time since most of us can remember, the monthly rate of inflation was only one per cent. In midweek, the main story suddenly was the coming to trial, at last, of John W. Hinckley Junior for the attempted murder of President Reagan.

Remember, the man who shot the Pope was tried and convicted in six weeks, the assassins of President Sadat in three months. It has been 13 months since John Hinckley, standing across the sidewalk from the president as he moved towards his car, lifted his gun and fired, wounded the president and a secret service man and a policeman and reduced to permanent invalidism the president's press secretary. The secret service men were at Hinckley's elbow and grabbed him and took him in at once. That was 30 March 1981. On Wednesday** 27 April 1982 Hinckley came to trial.

He was of course arraigned at once but, throughout the past year, there have been innumerable secret court hearings, exhaustive psychiatric tests at frequent intervals, protests and motions for release from the defence lawyers, postponements of judgment. Finally, a trial.

This comes about not, as they like to deplore in some Latin countries, because of possible corruption or bureaucratic fumbling, but because the rights of a suspect taken into custody by the policy were enormously strengthened – some people believe strengthened beyond reason – by an historic ruling of the Supreme Court in 1966, the case of Miranda versus the state of Arizona.

Before that, any suspect, whether at the scene of a crime or not, could be told, after the English procedure, that anything he said could be used in evidence against him. He might or might not understand that, being a Mexican, a new Vietnamese immigrant or simply a stubborn old cuss. Even if he understood it, he could be hauled off to jail and questioned, grilled endlessly.

The Miranda decision went further. It said that no matter how hot the heat of the moment – the scramble, for instance, in apprehending a man with a smoking gun – he must be asked at once, before anything else is said, whether or not he wants a lawyer. If he says yes, he cannot be questioned until he's at the jailhouse or the court in the presence of his lawyer. If he can't afford a lawyer, of course, the court must appoint one for him.

At all times, thereafter, he can only be questioned in his lawyer's presence and he can choose to be silent on the lawyer's advice. In case after case, since the famous 1966 ruling, criminals have been set free even by the Supreme Court who were able to show that in the moment of their being picked up, the rule about a lawyer was not made quite clear. Now it's not difficult for an illiterate or a semi-literate or a puzzled or even a shrewd criminal to make out that the first words that came from the apprehending police officer were accusing or confused or irrelevant to the rule.

Well, evidently, it has been established, finally, to the satisfaction of the court that Hinckley was properly advised, though we'll never know from the interminable length of the secret hearings how long it took to make this plain and acceptable to all parties. For at least eight or nine months of the first year that Hinckley was held, the crucial question was about his sanity. There was never the slightest doubt that he had pointed the gun and fired. For a time it was held, it may still be held, by the defence that Hinckley fired not at the president or any of the men who were wounded, but at the car, as some sort of dramatic warning.

Anyway, he's had months of psychiatric tests and the central issue of the case now is one of insanity. Hinckley has pleaded guilty by reason of being so mentally disturbed at the time that he could not then, and may not now, be held responsible for his actions.

But before the case comes to that main issue, there appears to be a strong possibility that the trial will be postponed again. The defence, for instance, has moved to rule out the huge docket of evidence accumulated by the psychiatrists the government hired on the ground that their conclusions were tainted – as the legal word has it – tainted by evidence obtained illegally. Then there's a panel of 48 potential jurors and the American procedure of questioning and challenging and rejecting by both sides can be exhaustive too.

There was a cartoon in the current New Yorker of a glum-looking man in a bar, turning to his friend on the next stool and saying, 'And then it hit me! I've reached that stage in life where most of my friends are lawyers'. He's a comparatively lucky man because this is, and always has been, a nation of lawyers. Of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States, businessmen, merchants, landowners and the rest, more than half of them were lawyers and very often an offence, whether civil or criminal, is not something to settle with all deliberate speed, but an opportunity for a prolonged joust between the native cunning of one lawyer or set of lawyers and the knowledge of precedents of the other.

A most distinguished old American jurist, the late Judge Learned Hand, once said, 'Nobody I think has a greater respect than I for the majesty of the law, but I have to say that my advice to any American is, throughout his life, to try and avoid litigation at all costs'.

Now there are just two points I want to make about the recent reporting of the Falklands. One was the interview with the admiral commanding the British fleet, during which he gave off the startlingly cocksure opinion that the conquest of the Falklands would be a walkover. Those of us who have covered wars and rumours of war for the past 40 years and more, never recall any battle commander who, before the event, ever predicted an easy victory. Risky talk! I understand he's been told so.

The other point is the remarkable series of dispatches from London by military correspondents totting up the entire weaponry and matériel of the British forces and then figuring when and where the assault would be made. What has happened, if not to military censorship, to journalistic restraint? What would have happened to any correspondent who reported, on the eve of the invasion of Europe, that General Eisenhower had mounted such and such an amphibious operation, mentioned where it was based and said he would land on the coast of Normandy on 5 June?

**NOTE: this is an error; the trial opened on Tuesday, April 27.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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