1974-01-03

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^ 4 Pr/ z^ Winning Weekly Serving The Greater Farmingdale Area Since 1920 15C
y4 » Official Newspaper for the Village of Farmingdak
VOL. 55 NO. 8 Second Class Postage Paid
in Farmingdale, N. Y. 11735 Thursday, January 3, 4974 Coi » vright 1973 by
Island- Wide Publication, Inc. price 15< - $ 5 per year
Deserter Surrenders To FBI
" Jesus High" Star Turns Self In
Kddie NeNally emotes in " Jesus High"
YOU BE THE JUDGE
One day last week, too long­time
army fugitives walked out
of a Greenwich village cafe and
surrendered themselves to
waiting FBI agents in a meeting
arranged by the Safe Return
Amnesty Committee.
One of the two. Edmund Mc-
Nally, 23. of Farmingdale, could
hardly be described as " hidding
out" from the authonties. He
played the second lead role in the
PRICE musical production
" Jesus High" and his picture
appeared in the Farmingdale
Post no less than three times
during the past year
Seven years ago, when he was
16, Edmund McNally dropped out
of. Junior High School 296 in
Ridgewood, Brooklyn, to work in
" a lot of no account, low paying
jobs" delivering packages,
running messages, pumping gas.
His father lived on Social
Security as a retired moving
man. His mother earned a
meager living as a barmaid.
They were separated.
A year later, McNally, joined
the Army. He was trained at Fort
Jackson, S. C., and Fort Lee, Va.,
as an ordnance man, he learned
how to order repair parts for
rifles and howitzers. Then he was
sent to an Army post at Man­nheim,
Germany. " Over there,
they didn't need repair parts
specialists. They needed
sweepers, cleaning men. That's
what I was, excess personnel,
biding time, cleaning up," he
said. " I couldn't take the fact that
I was destined to be a porter,
cleaning walls and bathrooms
and washing windows." So he
volunteered to go to Vietnam. For
McNally, serving in a supply
company in the Long My Valley
in the central highlands, there
was little warfare. " I never fired
a weapon in 13 months over
there," he said. But by his ac­count,
there were plenty of drugs
and prostitutes, and a series of
frustrating tasks " like moving a
box from one place to another."
McNally took off for Saigon, but
was picked up by MPs and
returned to his unit for a sum­mary
court- martial, which
resulted in his demotion from
corporal to private. " I was just a
nothing again."
Transferred to another unit, " I
was considered a joke, the lowest
of the low. Everybody laughed at
me." He drew menial details, like
digging holes.
Depressed (" I just about gave
up on everything") and degraded
(" like being a court jester"),
McNally increased his intake of
opium. Two or three months
before his scheduled return to the
U. S., he .. discovered he was
hooked. " I can't go home like
this," he told himself. McNally
found a Vietnamese doctor to
a d m i n i s t e r detoxification
treatment. It worked, he said,
and he went home clean.
Back in the States, McNally -
having served two years and
three months of a three- year
commitment - decided to quit the
Army. " I just said I can't be in
the military any more It's not
doing anything for me. I learned
nothing. It was the waste of a
good mind. Besides seeing
Vietnam changed my thought
process. I saw no reason to be
there."
Given ditch- digging and leaf-raking
duties at Fort Leonard
Wood, Mo., McNally hitchhiked
to New York, got money from his
parents, took a plane to Montreal.
found a furnished room near
McGill University, and sold
underground newspapers for a
group called the American
Deserters Committee. But there
I Continued on page 5 I
Another View For Court Reform by Don V. Griffo
" Experience has shown that the
impeachment the Constitution
has provided is not even a
scarecrow."
Thomas Jefferson
How right Jefferson was! One
has only to review the course of
events in American history to
accredit him with a profound
understanding of human nature.
In the light of events ensuing his
times, the truth of his hindsight
appeared to plague the American
system of justice down through
the troublesome decades.
The following presentation
reflects the evaluation of our
American system of justice
through the eyes of a citizen-layman;
one who studied and
taught the textbook description of
the system as to how the system
is supposed to function, on the one
hand, and saw how the system
actually operates in practice- the
administration of the activities of
those elected officials- relegated
the responsibility of meting out
justice', on the other.
" In the 182 years since" the
adoption of the Constitution of the
United States, only nine judges
have been impeached and only
four convicted and removed from
office. Of the fifty- five judges
who have been investigated by
the House of Representatives,
eight ( and one justice) were
impeached, eight were censured,
but not impeached, seventeen
others resigned at one stage or
another in the conduct of the
investigation, while the rest were
absolved of impeachable con­duct.
Added to this are the un­determined
number of judges
who resigned under the mere
threat of inquiry* for them there
are no adequate records."
Although critics of the elective
practice of assigning judges/ offer
corrective measures for im­provement
that sound
meritorious in theory, yet, there
is at least a doubt whether
replacing the elective system
with an appointment process
would screen out the corrupt
judge. Neither could it be proven
in advance that there is a
recognizable type of corrupt
judge. " A study of thirty- two of
the Federal judges against whom
there was a considerable body of
adverse evidence and who were
subjects of congressional im-vestigation,
impeachment
proceedings, or criminal action
indicates that they were
recruited from the most diverse
environments . Many were
honor graduates and became
trustees of universities; one was
an authority on oriental
languages; another was the
brother of one of America's
distinguished historians; one
entered politics as a reform
candidate; and another was the
daily associate of gangsters and
' ward' politicians."
The revelation of judicial
misconduct cited above resulted
after the sifting of " hundreds of
complaints that were registered
over the years." However, there
are cases whereby the House took
no action although the House
committee has recommended
DST Returns
After an absence of only
two months, Daylight Saving
Time will return this Sun­day,
January 6, courtesy of
the energy crisis.
If you are used to using the
" Spring ahead, fall back"
system of remembering
which way to turn your clock
before retiring Saturday
night, set yourself for spring.
Turn your clock ahead one
hour and save an hour of
daylight at the end of the
day.
impeachment of certain judges
under investigation. Despite the
fact that Judge Philip Lawrence,
Judge Augustus Ricks and Judge
Grover Moscowitz were charged
with either malicious abuses,
showing favoritism to a litigant
or for appropriating moneys of
the United States for personal
use, yet no action was taken for
the impeachment of these judges.
True, the House of
Representatives is prevailed
upon, at times, to initiate im­peachment
proceedings against
judges on the bench, for their
alleged judicial misconduct; but
the House tends to draw back
from taking the time of the whole
Senate ... away from all the other
pressing issues that it must act
upon in the normal course of its
activities; such proceedings
usually place an extra burden of
hearings and weighing testimony
upon Senators already preoc­cupied
with other duties; for this
reason, congressmen tend to be
unwilling to try judges, even in
cases of alleged judicial
misconduct; that judges of such
unethical and immoral in­clinations
and practices may
never be charged with im­peachable
acts " is a standing
invitation for judges to abuse
their authority with impunity and
without fear of removal."
Perhaps, it may be a matter of
conjecture* whether Congressmen
are willing to suffer a
misbehaving judge rather than
stop the legislative activities of
the United States, but it's still a
probable cause for the weakness
of the existing removal
machinery for impeachable
judges, nonetheless.
An epic case relative to the
inextricable grasp our elected
judges have over their ap­pointments
is'the one concerning
a U. S. District Judge, Albert W
Johnson, a judge for the Middle
District of Pennsylvania. By his
mere survival as a Federal judge
for twenty years from 1925 to
1945, stands as a monument to a
legal tradition - " the morbid
reluctance to remove a corrupt
and venal judge."
Complaints about Judge
Johnson's obnoxious practices
started soon after he took office,
though he was under continuous
investigations, action to remove
" his honor" was taken in 1945
following two decades of flagrant
misconduct in office. The
memory of the many years that
Judge Johnson sat on the bench
I Continued on page Hj