THE SUPREME COURT: Roman Holiday’s End

Of all the disputed internal-security decisions laid down by the Supreme Court in 1956-57, none stirred up more wrath than the Jencks case ruling. Its gist: a defendant in a federal criminal case had a legal right to examine pretrial statements of Government witnesses. Warned Justice Tom Clark in his dissent: the decision granted criminals a “Roman holiday for rummaging” in FBI files.

Last week, continuing its trend toward narrowing the internal-security decisions

(TIME, June 22), the Supreme Court called off the holiday by rejecting seven appeals based on the Jencks ruling. Written by Justice Felix Frankfurter (joined by Tom Clark, John Marshall Harlan, Charles Evans Whittaker, Potter Stewart), the main opinion in the seven cases upheld a statute passed by Congress in 1957 to narrow the Jencks decision. Its basic rules:

1) it is up to the trial judge to screen the Government files in the case and decide what the defense is entitled to see, and

2) the defense has a right to examine only signed statements of witnesses and “substantially verbatim” transcripts—not, for example, an unevaluated FBI report written up after a conversation with an informant.