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There's a scene in the 1942 film "The Talk of the Town'' in which a fugitive framed for murder, played by Cary Grant, chides a law professor (Ronald Colman) for reducing the law to a set of rules and facts.
"People wind facts around each other like a pretzel,'' says Grant's character, Leopold Dilg. "Where's the soul, where's the instinct, where's the warm human side? ...Your way, you have a Greek statue, beautiful but dead.''
It's available on video. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer might want to check it out.
The court's hearing on medical marijuana on Nov. 29, a case about whether federal drug laws can be enforced against locally grown pot supplied to patients without charge, was the first I'd ever attended. So I was probably among the few reporters dumbfounded to hear Breyer deliver an obviously well- prepared lecture to the lawyer for two Northern California women who sued to be safe from federal prosecution.
In urbane tones, the justice, a San Francisco native, said he'd reviewed all the paperwork in the case and still wasn't sure whether marijuana had any medical value. Rather than going to court, he said, people like these two women, who have strong views, might have asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to answer the question once and for all.
"That would seem to be the obvious way to get what they want,'' Breyer said. Then the punch line: "Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.''
The women's lawyer, Randy Barnett, replied that the government had a long record of obstruction on the issue. In fact, as Breyer and everyone else in the courtroom knew, the FDA, part of an administration committed to the war on drugs under both Democrats and Republicans, isn't about to reclassify marijuana as medicine.
As if to drive the point home, less than two weeks after the court hearing, the agency rejected a proposal, which it had been considering since mid-2001, to let the University of Massachusetts grow marijuana for medical research.
Barnett might have also noted that "medicine by regulation'' has traditionally been left to the states and that California regulates the doctors who recommend marijuana under Proposition 215, the initiative approved by voters in 1996.
But on its face, Breyer's position didn't seem unreasonable. The FDA, despite recent blots on its record, presumably knows more about drugs than judges or voters do.
On the other hand, consider how his words must have sounded to one member of the audience, plaintiff Angel Raich.
Partially paralyzed, needing a wheelchair and in constant pain from a nightmarish assortment of internal disorders, spinal and pelvic conditions, a wasting syndrome and an inoperable brain tumor, Raich turned to marijuana as a last resort in 1997 and found relief. Now an advocate for other patients in Oakland, she consumes the drug every two waking hours and, according to both Raich and her doctor, would starve to death in agony if deprived of it.
As Raich commented after the hearing, Breyer's advice amounted to a death sentence.
Not that she plans to accept it -- she's made it clear that she'll leave the country if she loses the ruling, due by the end of June -- but as far as she's concerned, it's a little late in the day to be told to go through channels.
Still, hard cases make bad law, as they say, and justices whose decisions affect millions are supposed to look beyond particular circumstances and seek broad principles that are faithful to legal precedent. The results, courts often observe, may seem harsh in an individual case but serve justice, or at least the rule of law, in the aggregate.
But as Cary Grant's character might argue, a lot depends on whether you're on the giving or the receiving end of the court's view of justice. Consider Roger Coleman, a Virginia Death Row inmate whose state appeal of his death sentence was dismissed because his lawyer missed a filing deadline by three days.
In 1991, the Supreme Court refused to consider Coleman's federal court appeal. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion began with the words, "This is a case about federalism'' -- that is, the federal system's deference to state courts' procedures for their criminal cases.
Coleman, no doubt, had a different view of what the case was about. He went to his death eight months later, despite claims of innocence by his supporters that continue to this day. The state of Virginia is still fighting a request for DNA testing of some of the evidence.
Once in a while, a justice -- the late Harry Blackmun comes to mind -- seems to look at the world through Leopold Dilg's eyes.
In 1989, the court refused to let a mother sue the county whose social workers had ignored danger signs and allowed her 4-year-old son to remain with his father, who beat him into a coma. A six-member majority reasoned that the county had no duty to protect a child who wasn't in its custody.
"Poor Joshua!'' lamented Blackmun in a dissenting opinion, urging a constitutional interpretation that "recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging.''
Breyer is not given to such passionate outcries, but he's not known to be hard-hearted, and he would surely deny any intent to be insensitive to the marijuana plaintiffs.
The main legal issue in their case, after all, is not the effectiveness of either medical marijuana or the FDA, but whether the federal government has the constitutional power to prohibit a drug that was neither sold nor transported across state lines.
Breyer's position, which he has expressed in earlier cases and made clear at the November hearing, is that the government must have broad regulatory authority to protect public health and safety, even within a state's borders. This might upset marijuana patients and advocates but arguably would serve larger public interests.
Perhaps Breyer's suggestion about the FDA was a gentle hint to the plaintiffs not to pin their hopes on the courts.
Still, even Supreme Court justices might occasionally take note of the little people who get caught in the path of the law.
In the climactic scene of "The Talk of the Town,'' Ronald Colman holds off a lynch mob, then delivers a courtroom oration on the need to harmonize legal rules and human concerns. As wrong as it is to trample over the law, he tells the mob, it is equally wrong "to look upon the law as just a set of principles, just so much language printed on fine heavy paper. ...The law must be engraved in our hearts and practiced every minute, to the letter and the spirit.''
As the film closes, Colman's character has just been seated on the Supreme Court. Now that's a Hollywood ending.
By Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Head against heart in pot case / Supreme Court reviews local law
"People wind facts around each other like a pretzel,'' says Grant's character, Leopold Dilg. "Where's the soul, where's the instinct, where's the warm human side? ...Your way, you have a Greek statue, beautiful but dead.''
It's available on video. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer might want to check it out.
The court's hearing on medical marijuana on Nov. 29, a case about whether federal drug laws can be enforced against locally grown pot supplied to patients without charge, was the first I'd ever attended. So I was probably among the few reporters dumbfounded to hear Breyer deliver an obviously well- prepared lecture to the lawyer for two Northern California women who sued to be safe from federal prosecution.
In urbane tones, the justice, a San Francisco native, said he'd reviewed all the paperwork in the case and still wasn't sure whether marijuana had any medical value. Rather than going to court, he said, people like these two women, who have strong views, might have asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to answer the question once and for all.
"That would seem to be the obvious way to get what they want,'' Breyer said. Then the punch line: "Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.''
The women's lawyer, Randy Barnett, replied that the government had a long record of obstruction on the issue. In fact, as Breyer and everyone else in the courtroom knew, the FDA, part of an administration committed to the war on drugs under both Democrats and Republicans, isn't about to reclassify marijuana as medicine.
As if to drive the point home, less than two weeks after the court hearing, the agency rejected a proposal, which it had been considering since mid-2001, to let the University of Massachusetts grow marijuana for medical research.
Barnett might have also noted that "medicine by regulation'' has traditionally been left to the states and that California regulates the doctors who recommend marijuana under Proposition 215, the initiative approved by voters in 1996.
But on its face, Breyer's position didn't seem unreasonable. The FDA, despite recent blots on its record, presumably knows more about drugs than judges or voters do.
On the other hand, consider how his words must have sounded to one member of the audience, plaintiff Angel Raich.
Partially paralyzed, needing a wheelchair and in constant pain from a nightmarish assortment of internal disorders, spinal and pelvic conditions, a wasting syndrome and an inoperable brain tumor, Raich turned to marijuana as a last resort in 1997 and found relief. Now an advocate for other patients in Oakland, she consumes the drug every two waking hours and, according to both Raich and her doctor, would starve to death in agony if deprived of it.
As Raich commented after the hearing, Breyer's advice amounted to a death sentence.
Not that she plans to accept it -- she's made it clear that she'll leave the country if she loses the ruling, due by the end of June -- but as far as she's concerned, it's a little late in the day to be told to go through channels.
Still, hard cases make bad law, as they say, and justices whose decisions affect millions are supposed to look beyond particular circumstances and seek broad principles that are faithful to legal precedent. The results, courts often observe, may seem harsh in an individual case but serve justice, or at least the rule of law, in the aggregate.
But as Cary Grant's character might argue, a lot depends on whether you're on the giving or the receiving end of the court's view of justice. Consider Roger Coleman, a Virginia Death Row inmate whose state appeal of his death sentence was dismissed because his lawyer missed a filing deadline by three days.
In 1991, the Supreme Court refused to consider Coleman's federal court appeal. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion began with the words, "This is a case about federalism'' -- that is, the federal system's deference to state courts' procedures for their criminal cases.
Coleman, no doubt, had a different view of what the case was about. He went to his death eight months later, despite claims of innocence by his supporters that continue to this day. The state of Virginia is still fighting a request for DNA testing of some of the evidence.
Once in a while, a justice -- the late Harry Blackmun comes to mind -- seems to look at the world through Leopold Dilg's eyes.
In 1989, the court refused to let a mother sue the county whose social workers had ignored danger signs and allowed her 4-year-old son to remain with his father, who beat him into a coma. A six-member majority reasoned that the county had no duty to protect a child who wasn't in its custody.
"Poor Joshua!'' lamented Blackmun in a dissenting opinion, urging a constitutional interpretation that "recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging.''
Breyer is not given to such passionate outcries, but he's not known to be hard-hearted, and he would surely deny any intent to be insensitive to the marijuana plaintiffs.
The main legal issue in their case, after all, is not the effectiveness of either medical marijuana or the FDA, but whether the federal government has the constitutional power to prohibit a drug that was neither sold nor transported across state lines.
Breyer's position, which he has expressed in earlier cases and made clear at the November hearing, is that the government must have broad regulatory authority to protect public health and safety, even within a state's borders. This might upset marijuana patients and advocates but arguably would serve larger public interests.
Perhaps Breyer's suggestion about the FDA was a gentle hint to the plaintiffs not to pin their hopes on the courts.
Still, even Supreme Court justices might occasionally take note of the little people who get caught in the path of the law.
In the climactic scene of "The Talk of the Town,'' Ronald Colman holds off a lynch mob, then delivers a courtroom oration on the need to harmonize legal rules and human concerns. As wrong as it is to trample over the law, he tells the mob, it is equally wrong "to look upon the law as just a set of principles, just so much language printed on fine heavy paper. ...The law must be engraved in our hearts and practiced every minute, to the letter and the spirit.''
As the film closes, Colman's character has just been seated on the Supreme Court. Now that's a Hollywood ending.
By Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Head against heart in pot case / Supreme Court reviews local law
