The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

Intro

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. In the headlines this Friday, President Reagan asked that military personnel be exempt from budget cuts. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-cutting law was challenged in court. Britain gave a firm no to Libya sanctions, but Italy suspended the sale of arms to Libya. And the flight of space shuttle Columbia was scrubbed for the seventh time. The details are coming up in our news summary. Robin?

ROBERT MacNEIL: After the news summary, the constitutional debate over the Gramm-Rudman law with one of its authors, Senator Warren Rudman, and one of the congressmen challenging it, Michael Synar of Oklahoma. In the wake of the Roach execution today, the head of juvenile crime at the Justice Department debates a leading critic on the treatment of juvenile criminals. We have a documentary report on the growing strength and political clout of South Africa's black unions. Finally we have essayist Roger Rosenblatt on what the nation mourns in the late pop singer Ricky Nelson.News Summary

MacNEIL: President Reagan is asking Congress to protect military personnel from cuts required by the new Gramm-Rudman law. The law mandates progressive reductions in the federal deficit and requires budget cuts if the deficits fail to meet annual targets. The White House said the President is sending a letter saying he wanted military personnel exempt from cuts. That would mean that other parts of the Pentagon budget, like research and weapons procurement, might suffer correspondingly deeper cuts.

Meanwhile, the same Gramm-Rudman bill was being challenged as unconstitutional in a Washington court. Twelve congressmen and a government workers' union have filed suits before a special three-judge panel in U.S. district court. They claim the law violates the separation of execution and legislative branches of government. The National Treasury Employees Union sued because their anticipated 3.1 cost-of-living increase has been withheld. Some are saying the case could be the most far-reaching constitutional issue for the federal judiciary since President Nixon lost claims of executive privilege during Watergate. Jim?

LEHRER: On the Libya sanctions front today, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told reporters she did not believe sanctions worked, and Britain would not respond to the U.S. call for cooperation. But the Italian government announced it was suspending the sale of arms to Libya. Italy has been delivering arms to Libya under a sales agreement reached in 1981. Thatcher, in addition to rejecting sanctions, also cautioned against military action. "I must warn you that I do not believe in retaliatory strikes which are against international law," she said in London.

MacNEIL: U.S. unhappiness with the imbalance in trade with Japan was in the news again. In Tokyo, Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri told Japan that its growing trade surplus could trigger an earthquake in the international trade network. Danforth, one of six U.S. senators meeting Japanese trade officials, demanded a fresh approach to the trade deficit with the U.S., which is currently running at around $50 billion. In Washington, Secretary of State Shultz and the Japanese foreign minister, Shintaro Abe, held talks and said they'd made progress. Shultz said the best way to proceed was to remove difficulties industry by industry. Both ministers spoke to reporters.

GEORGE SHULTZ, Secretary of State: We haven't wrapped up all the problems. There are some continuing follow-up issues. But a great deal has been done, and they'll continue to be worked on. But since this idea of picking out particular areas and working on them seems to have succeeded, that's an approach that we'll take, and what we'll do is have kind of a diplomatic exchange and we'll settle on an area, and then we'll work on that for a while and then we'll settle on another one and so on.

SHINTARO ABE, Japanese Foreign Minister [through interpreter]: I am well aware that the situation is very serious in this country, including the mounting pressure for protectionism in the Congress. And Japan, in order to fulfill its responsibility in the international community from which it is benefiting, especially free trade from which it's benefiting, has been extending the maximum effort as it could to the solution of all the problems.

MacNEIL: American wholesale prices rose a modest 0.4 in December, making an increase of only 1.8 for the whole year 1985. Coupled with the figures for '83 and '84, it meant the lowest three-year wholesale inflation rate for two decades.

LEHRER: Bishop Tutu said in Washington today economic pressure may be the only way to avoid an explosion in South Africa. The Nobel Peace Prize winner said at a news conference, pressure from white business might cause the government to change its apartheid policies before it's too late.

Rt. Rev. DESMOND TUTU, Bishop of Johannesburg: All I know is that the South African government is extremely sensitive about any suggestions of sanctions. I cannot predict, obviously, how efficacious all of this is going to be, except that what I have seen to date indicates to me that the private sector is likely to say to the government -- well, I hope they will -- you are a liability that we cannotany longer afford.

LEHRER: Texaco finally won a round against Pennzoil today. A federal judge in New York allowed Texaco to appeal a $10.5 billion Texas court judgment without having to post a $12 billion bond. The judge said $1 billion would be enough. Texaco had said the 12 would force it into bankruptcy. A Houston jury awarded Pennzoil the record $10.5 billion judgment after finding Texaco improperly bought Getty Oil out from under Pennzoil.

MacNEIL: James Roach, convicted of killing two teenagers eight years ago when he was 17, was electrocuted before dawn this morning in South Carolina. The execution went ahead despite pleas for clemency from Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter and the secretary general of the United Nations. Here's a report by Tom Fowler of South Carolina Educational Television.

TOM FOWLER, South Carolina Educational Television [voice-over]: At 5:16 a.m., James Terry Roach was executed in South Carolina's electric chair. Convicted for the brutal murders of two Columbia teenagers in 1977, Roach and his attorneys exhausted all appeals. Last week South Carolina Governor Dick Riley announced he would not commute Roach's sentence. Last-minute arguments to the United States court of appeals and United States Supreme Court were also rejected.

Roach was 17 when he was sentenced to death for killing 17-year-old Tommy Taylor and 14-year-old Carlotta Hartness, who was also raped before being shot five times. Attorneys for Roach say the fact he was a minor and believed to be slightly retarded were never fully weighed.

Outside the prison walls supporters of Roach's execution outnumbered opponents about 20 to one. Asked about the issue of Roach's age at the time of the crime, one young man said, "Why should it matter? His victims were teenagers too." Of the other two men convicted with Roach in the 1977 killings, Joseph Carl Shaw was executed last year and a third is serving life for giving state's evidence.

LEHRER: Finally, and as usual, space shuttle Columbia did not make it today. Rain in the Cape Canaveral launch area was the culprit, and NASA said there would be another try Sunday morning at 6:55 Eastern time. The six astronauts and one congressman are going into space to study Halley's Comet, among other scientific things. Today's scrub was the seventh scrub for Columbia since December 18th.

MacNEIL: And that's our summary of the news. Coming up, is the Gramm-Rudman law unconstitutional? How should juvenile criminals be treated? Plus, a documentary on South African unions, and a Rosenblatt essay on Ricky Nelson. Budget Balancing Act

MacNEIL: First tonight we plunge into the thickets of one of the most unusual Washington legal battles in years. From the beginning, critics of the radical Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget bill have said it wouldn't work. Now they're in federal court saying it's unconstitutional. A dozen congressmen are making that argument before a special three-judge panel and are joined by the National Treasury Employees Union. They claim the bill violates the separation of executive and legislative powers and gives law-making power to unelected officials. Specifically, they say, it gives the General Accounting Office the final authority to determine budget cuts should Congress fail to reach the annual target for cutting the deficit. Complicating things, the administration is also challenging that part of the law, even though the President signed it. With us are two people in the thick of the argument. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma, who brought theoriginal suit; and Republican Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, one of the law's authors, who joins us tonight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Congressman Synar, how does this bill violate the principle of separating legislative and executive power?

Rep. MIKE SYNAR: Well, basically, Robin, it does it because the CBO, or Congressional Budget Office, and the Office of Management and Budget, in determining that we've gone over our targets, refers those numbers to the Government Accounting Office, which is a legislative animal, and that legislative animal then instructs the President, who is a member of the executive branch, to begin a sequester order. We argued today in court that that is a violation of the separation of powers. But we also argued that there was a violation of undue delegation of legislative power. In other words, members of Congress, like myself and Senator Rudman, have lost our ability to have input in behalf of our constituents because we have turned over the decision on the cuts to a group of unelected bureaucrats. Basically what Gramm-Rudman does is put this government on automatic pilot and takes it out of the hands of elected officials, which was the intention of the original founding fathers.

MacNEIL: Senator Rudman, isn't he right, isn't that a serious constitutional problem?

Sen. WARREN RUDMAN: It would be if he was right, but I think Mike is wrong. What Mike thinks and what I think tonight aren't terribly important. I think probably what nine members of the United States Supreme Court will think in several months is very important. I think they'll uphold the law, and let me tell you why. First, let's take the separation-of-powers argument. Two lower courts have held that, contrary to the position of Congressman Synar and the administration, the Congressional Budget Office and OMB do represent the legislature and the executive, but the GAO is an officer of the United States, not a legislative officer. As a curious matter, he has some of the apparel of both. He is appointed for a 15-year term, removable by the Congress, but he is appointed by the President. We think really he is the ombudsman of the government, and we believe the court will hold that he in fact is an executive branch officer.

Now as to the delegation argument, I think that is really the argument that has virtually no merit. Let me point out to the viewing audience tonight that the Congress delegates some very important things to various agencies. Let me just name two. We give the Bureau of Labor Statistics the opportunity to set the Consumer Price Index, the so-called CPI. That has an enormous effect on Americans in terms of their COLAs. It has an enormous effect on private transactions in terms of they're all tied to the cost of the Consumer Price Index. And finally, let me point out to the audience tonight and to my friend Mike Synar, that we delegate to the Federal Reserve Board the power to set the discount rate. It just seems to me that that is an enormous power. What we are giving the General Accounting Office is merely a ministerial duty to set a forecast based on a set of numbers joined in by the Congressional Budget Office and the OMB. We think we balanced separation of powers and the checks and balances, and we think it'll be upheld.

MacNEIL: Let's pull the two pieces of this apart, just for clarity. Congressman Synar, first, the senator is saying that the GAO is not a creature of the Congress, that it actually straddles the two -- you heard his argument -- is therefore independent.

Rep. SYNAR: Well, that argument could stand. And Warren is correct that it's been described as half-fish, half-fowl. But that's not really the only argument we made. It's very clear that the Congressional Budget Office is legislative, and since one set of the numbers comes out of that office, then it is a violation of a legislative agency directing the President what to do. There's no question CBO is a legislative agency.

MacNEIL: Just for clarity here. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, it comes up with one set of figures. The OMB, the President's Office of Management and Budget, comes up with another set of figures. Those are compared; they're measured against the estimates of the deficit and the budget, and then it's up to the GAO under the bill to say, okay, here's where you've got to better cut the budget, and he tells the President and the President does it. Is that -- and tells you to do it.

Rep. SYNAR: That's generally the way it works, yes.

MacNEIL: Now, what about his other point that it's a perfectly proper delegation of authority because you do it with the Federal Reserve Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Rep. SYNAR: Well, what Warren failed to complete his statement is that both in the labor statistics area and also with the Federal Reserve, Congress doesn't abdicate its power to change the abilities of those statistics, change COLAs; it doesn't give up its power on the Federal Reserve to have influence on their decisions. With Gramm-Rudman we've given up that option, we don't have influence.

MacNEIL: Well, isn't --

Sen. RUDMAN: As a matter of fact, we haven't given up anything, because I want to make one point that seems to be forgotten for everyone -- it certainly wasn't forgotten by the lawyers for the Senate who argued today. That is simply this, that after the budget process is completed and the sequester order is then cited, the Congress then has 30 days to do whatever it ought to do -- cut further spending, reallocate those cuts, raise taxes, whatever is necessary. The Congress has that final power. It is only if we abrogate our responsibility to the American people to cut these deficits, at that point then we have said to the Congressional Budget Office, the OMB, the GAO, you calculate the precise percentage in a ministerial way; the President has no discretion, he must set the priorities exactly as we set them and reduce them accordingly. So I really don't think that -- that does not fly.

MacNEIL: Let me make sure I understand you again, Senator. So supposing the budget you all agree on is over -- is not going to bring the deficit down in accordance with the law, the new law.

Sen. RUDMAN: Let's say it's $20 billion high, for instance.

MacNEIL: Twenty billion dollars high. Then the GAO decides that $5 billion of that's got to come out of defense --

Sen. RUDMAN: No.

MacNEIL: -- and the other $15 billion has got to come out of the domestic programs?

Sen. RUDMAN: No, the law -- that's inaccurate, Robin. What the law says is that 50 will come from defense, 50 will come from the other domestic programs that have not been exempted by the bill, but most importantly, the percentage is set by the guidelines of the bill; there is no discretion; whatever $20 billion bears to $600 billion, be that 1.5 , whatever, that is the figure, and then the reductions are made across the board. So you see, when we're all done, the priorities that the Congress set are precisely in the same order we started out with; they're only several percent less. And that is, I think, the elegant simplicity of this bill.

MacNEIL: What's wrong with that, Congressman, if Congress actually set those guidelines?

Rep. SYNAR: Well, I think, Robin, very clearly, from your first --

MacNEIL: You happen to have been outvoted on it, but the majority of the Congress in both houses did set that figure, that proportion.

Rep. SYNAR: That's correct. But there was no question that they had some serious constitutional questions, and that's why Warren himself wrote the fall-back position if this particular automatic trigger was found unconstitutional.

MacNEIL: What is the fall-back position?

Rep. SYNAR: Now, the fall-back position allows CBO and OMB to make those statistics available to a joint budget committee of the House and the Senate.

MacNEIL: This is if the bill is declared unconstitutional.

Rep. SYNAR: If the trigger is found unconstitutional.

MacNEIL: Trigger, yeah.

Rep. SYNAR: Then they, this joint budget committee, would then put the sequester order together for a vote between the House and the Senate and then to the President for his approval or disapproval. Now, that is constitutional because we haven't delegated away our power. Now, that's a much more preferable position.

MacNEIL: Now, does he describe your fall-back position accurately?

Sen. RUDMAN: Oh, yes, Mike describes it very accurately. There's only one problem with the fall-back position. He is right -- I did write it; it is important because it saves the bill if we do have adverse court action. The problem is that it takes an act of Congress and the signature of the President to certify a deficit, let's say $144 billion for fiscal '87, and by doing that we know that we are triggering a whole bunch of things, namely cuts in programs. I say that Congress has not had the backbone to do that in the past. We'll see whether it has the backbone to do it in 1986.

MacNEIL: I'd like to ask both of your opinions on -- starting with you, Congressman -- on the Justice Department's position today, which many people are saying is ironic since usually the Justice Department is in the position of defending a law against a challenge like this, since the President accepted it. What do you think about their argument that this power that Congress has put with the GAO really belongs with the President?

Sen. RUDMAN: Well, I -- let me answer first, just very briefly. I think it's consistent, Robin. The comptroller general has taken two independent actions in the last two years against various branches of the government. He is the ombudsman. The administration has challenged that, and in both cases lost in the lower courts. The cases are on appeal. They said he had no right to do it because he was a legislative officer. The courts found at the lower level, the federal district court, that in fact he was a member of the executive branch.

MacNEIL: The comptroller general you're talking about is the head of the GAO.

Sen. RUDMAN: That's right.

MacNEIL: He'd be the man who would really do this.

Sen. RUDMAN: But the Justice Department, in order to be consistent, Robin, it seems to me had to take the position they took. I expect they will lose that position.

MacNEIL: And do you also disagree with the Justice Department, Congressman Synar?

Rep. SYNAR: No, I agree with them. In fact, we were awfully surprised that they came in on our position. The Justice Department basically said that they didn't feel congressmen had standing to sue, but they agreed with our constitutional arguments. Now, why did they do that? Well, first of all, I think they did it because they see the GAO and the comptroller general as a person who will be more powerful than the President himself because of the sweeping powers he has under the automatic trigger. But secondly and more importantly, I think we learned something from the top news item you had in this show, which is today the President comes out and he's already trying to amend what we did with Gramm-Rudman by exempting military pay.

MacNEIL: I was just going to come to that. What is your attitude to that?

Sen. RUDMAN: Well, I want to correct that. I'm afraid that's inaccurate and I'm sure inadvertently so. The bill in the first year gives the Defense Department the power to make allocations within its own budget, including personnel or anything it wishes, for the first year only. That was an accommodation that both the House and the Senate made to the President and the secretary of defense. That's for the first year only.

MacNEIL: So you said --

Sen. RUDMAN: That was not an amendment, Robin; that is allowed under the law, and the President has told us today how he wants that done.

MacNEIL: So he's just invoking something he's allowed to do under the law?

Sen. RUDMAN: Absolutely. In the first year only.

Rep. SYNAR: No, that is not correct.

MacNEIL: Congressman Synar?

Sen. RUDMAN: That's my understanding.

Rep. SYNAR: No, that's not correct. What he has done is he wants to take one more thing off the table, which is military pay, before he starts shifting the funds around within the military budget. And that's exactly what we were trying to avoid in Gramm-Rudman, was taking things off the table that made other cuts deeper.

Sen. RUDMAN: If you're right about that, Mike, then we'll be shoulder to shoulder on resisting that one.

MacNEIL: I see. Well, we'll see what happens on that one. Thank you, Senator Rudman in Florida and Congressman Synar on Capitol Hill. Jim?

LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, should juvenile criminals be electrocuted and otherwise treated as adults; a documentary report on the trade union movement in South Africa, and some thoughts about the late Ricky Nelson by essayist Roger Rosenblatt. Youthful Justice

LEHRER: James Terry Roach died this morning in a South Carolina electric chair, his punishment for the brutal rape of a teenage girl and then the murder of her and her boyfriend. Any execution is a news event, but this one got special attention because Roach was only 17 years old when he committed the crimes eight years ago. It has rekindled the debate over how to deal with juveniles who commit crimes -- harshly, in accordance with their severity, with the severity of the crime, or more gently, in accordance with their age. We begin our look at the question with a background report on the Roach case, done before the South Carolina governor turned down the final appeals. The correspondent is Tom Bearden.

TOM BEAR Carlotta Hartness came here to the Polo Road Park on the outskirts of Columbia. According to court testimony, another car containing three men pulled up and parked next to them. The next day police found Tommy Taylor's body slumped over the wheel of his car. He had been shot three times. Carlotta Hartness' body was found in the woods some distance away. She had been repeatedly shot, raped, and her body was mutilated. Carlotta Hartness was 14 years old. The age of the victim and the violence of the crime outraged this community.

[voice-over] Police quickly arrested Terry Roach and two others for the crime. Sixteen-year-old Ronnie Mahaffey turned state's evidence. He told prosecutors that he and Roach had followed the lead of 24-year-old J.C. Shaw in the commission of the crime. Mahaffey said Roach obeyed Shaw's instructions in shooting both Taylor and Hartness. Mahaffey also revealed Shaw had raped and murdered another woman only a week earlier. Less than two months later, Shaw and Roach had both entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to death. Mahaffey got a life sentence. Shaw was executed last January. Roach's case has been under continuous appeal ever since.

GRADY QUERY, defense lawyer: There is a great deal of question as to the degree of his participation. We feel that we could prove without any question that his participation was relatively minor, at least when compared with that of Shaw, and that he in fact did not take life nor did he intend to take life.

JAMES ANDERS, prosecutor: It's uncontradicted, as far as I know, that he shot both the young Taylor boy and the Hartness girl. It's uncontradicted.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Solicitor James Anders prosecuted the original case. He rejects all the defense arguments.

Mr. ANDERS: Terry Roach, in my 12 years as the chief prosecutor from this jurisdiction, is about the meanest person that I've ever laid my eyes on. The truth is, he was competent, he was mean, he was cruel, and he participated in three murders. That's the truth.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Lawyer David Bruck represents a dozen men on South Carolina's death row. He is a well-known opponent of capital punishment, particularly for juveniles.

DAVID BRUCK, attorney: Terry Roach was involved in a very brutal murder, a murder that really blighted the lives of several families. And it's the kind of crime that just sort of tears at the heart of anybody that cares about it. Those are the sorts of crimes that sometimes make us respond in ways that we won't be proud of when we look back later.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Bruck says well-established international law forbids juvenile executions.

Mr. BRUCK: Even countries like Libya, Russia, South Africa, China, Iraq, all have laws against the execution of people who were the age that Terry Roach was when he committed his crime, that is, under the age of 18. It's inconceivable to me that the United States, which stands as a beacon of human rights in the rest of the world, is going to continue on this course very much longer. So the question isn't, should we execute juveniles; it's, should we execute two or three or six or 10 more juveniles before we stop?

Mr. ANDERS: Society has the right to punish anyone who doesn't agree with it. We could not live, it would seem to me, in an ordered society. If we don't punish criminals, how are the rest of us to live? I don't advocate at all, I don't think you'd find any person in their right mind advocating that every person 15, 16, 17, 18 years of age should be put in the electric chair. The penalty has to fit the crime, and if the crime is heinous enough, then the punishment should be the ultimate.

BEARDEN: Do you feel any guilt yourself about what happened?

JAMES TERRY ROACH, death row inmate [Dec. 31, 1985]: Yeah. I'm sorry that three people is dead, and I'm sorry for the families of the dead. But if by executing me will bring any of them back, bring all the people back alive, then I would say okay, they said I did it, and it's bringing them back alive, I'd say go ahead and do it. But it ain't going to change nothing. And I'm really sorry what happened, and I just hope, you know, that I do get a stay before next Tuesday. I know if I don't, you know, they're going to move me to the death house and then that Friday they kill me. And I just don't want to die that way. I don't think nobody should -- that nobody ever should be put to death in the electric chair. But the only thing I can do now, okay, is just wait and see what the governor says, if he's going to give me a stay or say that he ain't going to intervene in the case. But I know that I don't want to die in that electric chair.

LEHRER: That report by Tom Bearden. We go now to the debate over how best to deal with juvenile offenders. Alfred Regnery heads the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Jerome Miller is president of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives. He is the former head of state juvenile justice systems in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Mr. Miller, should the fact that Roach was 17 when these crimes were committed have been enough to keep him from being executed in your opinion?

JEROME MILLER: I think so, although I oppose the death penalty for anyone. But I think it's obscene that we would talk about executing juveniles.

LEHRER: Why?

Mr. MILLER: There are many reasons. It's just not befitting our culture at this time in our civilization, and looking at him -- I didn't know him, of course, but I've known dozens like him; it brings back a lot of memories of young men I've known in the system who have done similar things -- and it's very clear that we will execute juveniles provided they are not middle-class, white, middle-class kids, the kind that would be the sons and daughters of legislators or judges. This kid would be a white kid executed; if we execute others, there'll be a lot of blacks. We execute basically the rabble, if you want to put it that way, and we're able to objectify them as something other than our own. And if we could simply treat the dangerous juvenile the same way we would insist on treating a dangerous son, daughter, relative who were in trouble, legitimately dangerous, we'd be quite reasonable. We wouldn't talk this sort of nonsense which demeans us all.

LEHRER: Mr. Regnery, is this obscene what happened to Terry Roach today?

ALFRED REGNERY: No, I don't think it is. You might take the position that the death penalty in itself is obscene, and whether it is or isn't, I guess, isn't really something I'm going to say. I do think, though, that if you're going to have the death penalty, which we do, that it is appropriate to execute somebody like Mr. Roach. The crime that he committed I guess by anybody's standard was obscene. A 14-year-old girl was mutilated, raped, murdered after having watched her boyfriend be murdered. And the defendant Roach was, as I understand it, four months short of being 18. Now, I don't think that we should, if we're going to have the death penalty, that it's appropriate to have an arbitrary cutoff age at which it is not implemented. I think that age certainly should be a mitigating factor, as are a lot of other things, and I assume it probably was in the court in South Carolina. But the judge, for whatever reason, decided that it wasn't enough of a mitigating factor to keep the death penalty from being imposed.

I think that in response to Jerry's comment about minorities and so on, I think one interesting thing is that in polls that have recently been done, minorities favor the death penalty more than whites do, because young minority men are the ones who are victimized, they were the ones who were murdered. Murder is the highest cause of death in young minority, young black males. And they are the ones who want the death penalty simply because I guess they think it may protect some lives.

LEHRER: Moving it away from an argument just about the death penalty, gentlemen, to the question of how to deal with juvenile criminals. Is it your position, Mr. Miller, that they are a special category and should be treated as a special category, across the board?

Mr. MILLER: Yes, and they can be, and they can be effectively treated that way. The system I ran in Massachusetts we were able to treat youngsters like this that had done things equally heinous, some worse than this.

LEHRER: Treat them in what way?

Mr. MILLER: In decent, humane ways where they're not loose, where you're guaranteed public safety, but you're also given time to understand them, understand where they came from, how did this develop. These people aren't devils that appear suddenly to commit these horrid crimes. There's something that's gone on in their lives, there's something that's gone on in their constitution, in their makeup, that we should know and that we should understand. And we can still have our public safety, not letting them loose. But we had small individualized settings, a lot of care, a lot of concern and a lot of control.

Mr. REGNERY: In some ways I agree, in some ways I disagree. I think you don't make any clear-cut line of demarcation. I think that many juveniles should be treated differently. The first-time offenders, the truants, people that commit lesser offenses; but for better or worse I think there are some juveniles -- and those are primarily the ones who are chronic offenders, who are serious offenders, who commit the bulk of serious juvenile crime -- have to be treated like adults.

LEHRER: And would you draw the line anywhere?

Mr. REGNERY: Well, in essence you draw the line. I think really the way the system works now isn't really all that bad. And what that is, is that we draw a line, but we make exceptions to it. And in most cases, let's say if the line is 18 but if a 16- or 17-year-old or a 15-year-old commits a murder or rape, another particularly serious crime, what we do is transfer him into the adult system. I don't advocate treating anybody cruelly. I think that in some cases you have to lock people up, unfortunately, simply for the safety of the rest of us. But I think each case is different, each case has different motivations, each person is different. And I think the system is set up in such a way and can be made to work in such a way that it takes those differences into account.

LEHRER: What's wrong with that?

Mr. MILLER: Well, first off, to talk about treating juveniles as adults as though that worked is of course hypocrisy. There's no possibility it's going to work. The juvenile system --

LEHRER: Why not? Why not?

Mr. MILLER: If there's anything we know in this country it's that our adult criminal justice system's been a massive failure and continues to be. And to suggest by moving a kid into the adult system we're going to get law and order and public safety is patent nonsense. The adult system is a huge fiasco. It brutalizes, it makes people worse by and large. There's no evidence that you can individualize in that system as much as my good friend here Al likes to talk about individualization. There's no individualization in that warehousing system. There's no individualization around understanding where these people came from, what their crime's all about, what we should do with them. We're dealing with large categories, moving them around, and I want to stress again, we're dealing primarily with the black, with the hispanic and with the poor white. We're not talking about middle-class youngsters or adults. They do not populate our prisons except by fluke. So that it's easy to talk about throwing away the key and locking people up and getting tougher with crime as long as we think we're talking about an entirely different creature than our own, and that's exactly what we think we're talking about. By and large the code word these days when you talk about violent juvenile crime is inner-city black crime, and we like to really deal with them as a different kind of genus, a different kind of animal. And unfortunately we're treating them like animals. You go to Rikers Island in New York, you'll find 1,500 kids in the adolescent remand center. You'd be hard put to find --

LEHRER: What's a remand center?

Mr. MILLER: It's a detention center. It's a human sewer, a warehouse, in which these kids are piled up in cells. You'd be hard put out of the 1,500 to find more than a half a dozen white kids. Where are they? Surely they are not that misrepresented in the crime rates in New York City.

LEHRER: And your point is -- what is your point?

Mr. MILLER: My point is that we've got to begin to treat the average offender the way we would insist on treating our own son or daughter were they in trouble. If they were in trouble we would be cautious, we wouldn't want them to repeat the crime; we might even put them under lock and key, but we would not do the kinds of things we are talking about here, and we wouldn't even consider executing them.

Mr. REGNERY: Well, Jerry, I think you're exaggerating. I think that you and I both know that there are a great many places where juveniles are kept, in fact, the majority of them, which are relatively decent places. Certainly they're not supposed to be country clubs; they shouldn't be. But there are places where juveniles are trained, where they're given an education, where they're treated fairly and so on. But they have to be isolated from society. We're just completing a study in our office looking at the incidence of children, juveniles who are put into the adult court system. What it finds is in fact that the children are not any more likely to be -- to successfully be prosecuted, but if they are, they're going to get locked up for a long period of time. Most of those are kids who have committed murders, they've committed violent rapes and other violent crimes, and in most cases they've committed a lot of crimes.

Mr. MILLER: But how successful --

Mr. REGNERY: Just let me finish. Whether it's successful in turning them around is not the question. The question is, it is protecting the rest of society from those people who have demonstrated they're going to be violent and who we know are going to continue to be. Most juvenile crime is committed by five or six percent of the juvenile population. Those are kids who are committing 100, 200, 300 felonies in the course of a year.

LEHRER: And those are the ones you think should be dealt with as adults.

Mr. REGNERY: Those are the ones I think have to be isolated from society. I'm not saying necessarily put a 15 in the same cell with an adult. Absolutely not. What I'm saying is you have a separate wing, you have a separate institution, which almost every place does; you treat them somewhat differently, but you isolate them from society simply because we haven't yet figured out anything else to do with them that protects the rest of us.

Mr. MILLER: I'm not suggesting that someone that goes out and commits this sort of heinous crime should be let loose in society. I don't like the word "isolate from society." But I do think one can have public safety and locked settings for that. For example, when I ran the systemin Massachusetts, we developed small, caring, decent locked settings for 10 or 12 kids in a place where they aren't subject to the rape and mayhem of the large institution. We did the same thing in Pennsylvania with the RCA unit, and it worked quite well.

Mr. REGNERY: Jerry, that's true, but you know as I do in Massachusetts when you did that, that one of the effects was that a lot more kids were transferred into the adult system.

Mr. MILLER: That is not true. That's a myth.

Mr. REGNERY: I talked to your successor this afternoon, and he told me that's exactly what happened.

Mr. MILLER: That is not true, and the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice should know it. And I can give you the figures year by year. In fact in Massachusetts the number of kids moved into the adult system is less than a dozen a year.

Mr. REGNERY: Not the adult prison; those who are tried in adult court --

Mr. MILLER: That's what I mean.

Mr. REGNERY: -- and may have been put into juvenile institutions afterward.

LEHRER: Are the incidents of violent crimes committed by juveniles on the way up?

Mr. REGNERY: No. It's about the same. That is, the number of violent crimes per 100,000 juveniles. Actually, juveniles are committing a few percentage points fewer crimes as compared to the adult population. That's mostly because of the demographics.

Mr. MILLER: Of course, that's the irony of it.

Mr. REGNERY: Just a minute.

Mr. MILLER: That's just the irony of it.

Mr. REGNERY: The thing is, again, that most juveniles -- most juvenile crime is committed by a very small segment of the juvenile population. Those kids remain about constant, in this country and in England, in Sweden, other places where studies have been done. What we are finding, though, is that small percentage is committing more crimes and the crimes they're committing are more violent than they were five or 10 years ago.

LEHRER: You dispute that?

Mr. MILLER: Yes, I do. And juvenile crime generally is going down right now.

Mr. REGNERY: As a percentage of all crime.

Mr. MILLER: Yes, as a percentage of all crime. The amount of violent juvenile crime has been relatively constant. It peaked a bit in '81, it peaked in the late '60s and early '70s and it went down. It'll peak again in about eight years when this little baby boomlet reaches the teen years.

LEHRER: But what about his point that the small number of the hard juvenile criminals are committing more harsh crimes, more violent crimes?

Mr. MILLER: I think that's true, I think that's true. But I don't agree that those are the ones, therefore, we move into the adult system. I think those are the ones that we concentrate our services on, and those are the ones that we concentrate developing new options for, even if they are closed options.

LEHRER: But protect them -- keep them locked up. You're not saying --

Mr. MILLER: Some. Some. But what he's saying, and what people like James Q. Wilson do not make clear, is they are basically talking of inner-city black kids, and that's the code word in all this.

LEHRER: Is that the code word?

Mr. REGNERY: Well, that's not the code word at all, Jerry. It does happen that a great deal of crime is committed by inner-city black kids, that's true. But that is just -- for whatever reason they commit the crimes, it does not mean the system is racist and arrests more, and we've shown that by study after study. I think the important point, though, is that the juvenile system can be rather effective for a lot of kids, and those are the first- and second-time offenders. But in order to be, you really have to remove the very violent chronic offenders so that you can make the system work for the rest of them. You have to divide them, in other words, into two different segments.

LEHRER: Finally, gentlemen, let's come back to the Roach case very quickly. What do you think the public effect of this is going to be? In other words, the execution, with all the publicity today, of somebody who committed a crime when they were 17 years old. Is there going to be -- what do you think?

Mr. REGNERY: Well, I guess -- what I understand the people of South Carolina support the decision. Now, whether if you're asking is that going to have a deterrent effect on crime, I have absolutely no --

LEHRER: Any kind of effect.

Mr. REGNERY: I have no idea, and I don't think anybody else does. We can't show that the death penalty is a deterrent. By the same token we can't show that it is not a deterrent. And I guess I look at it as being somewhat ahead of the game in either case, because if it is a deterrent -- and we don't know that it is, but if it is -- we may have prevented a lot of crimes from having happened from people that wouldn't have otherwise done it. If it's not, the least we have done is executed a lot of people who the state feels should have been executed anyway. In either case I think we're ahead of the game.

Mr. MILLER: Well, I don't think that puts anyone ahead of the game. And in fact, the research on the death penalty shows that it does not deter crime. And the most recent research in a book out of Yale University shows that in fact each execution probably stimulates a few murders, because it is an officially condoned violence, and people who are kind of walking the edge like to play with that. With reference to the public support, the public support is there, and the public support will probably grow.

LEHRER: You mean for capital punishment.

Mr. MILLER: Sure. And I think that watching that obscene scene of people standing around with signs "Burn a Roach" tells us what it's about. There's nothing humane or decent or civilized about it, and it uncivilizes the rest of us. It's a terrible tragedy for all of us.

LEHRER: All right. Gentlemen, thank you both very much.

Mr. REGNERY: Thank you. South Africa: Political Unions

MacNEIL: Today a six-member congressional delegation wound up a fact-finding mission in South Africa to gauge the impact of Washington's sanctions against Pretoria. Their presence drew hostile comment today from the government-controlled radio, which accused them of interference and slowing reform by harming the economy. The delegation has met with government officials, members of anti-apartheid groups and representatives of trade unions. The trade union movement has recently taken on added importance in South Africa, with the formation of a federation uniting many of the nonwhite unions. We trace the development of this movement now with a documentary report from Michael Buerk of the BBC.

MICHAEL BUERK, BBC [voice-over]: The crowd wore red T-shirts and funny hats, and spent most of the time singing. But it was perhaps one of the most significant political events here for a decade. On a rugby pitch, on a sweltering Durban afternoon, black trade unions launched themselves into politics. Chris Dlamini is one of a young generation of black union leaders. He's relatively privileged in this society: he has the right to live in a house in the black township of Kwa Thama. It's close enough to his job for him to get a taxi there and back each day. And he works for an American company, Kellogg's. Like most American firms here, Kellogg's operates by a set of principles known as the Sullivan Code that forbid racial discrimination and encourage unions. Chris Dlamini is national president of his union. In the six years since black unions were made legal, he and other leaders have steered clear of politics, building their power base within their industries.

CHRIS DLAMINI, union president: The relationship between industry and the dozens of workers has developed over time because of the strength of the union and, you know, the enlightened attitude of the top management, I would say. So up to now I would say that -- I mean, the relationship is quite good.

BUERK [voice-over]: Businessmen accept the unions. It's one way of distancing themselves from apartheid.

JOHN K. JOHNSON, Kellogg's, South Africa: One of the things we're trying to combat is this belief that the free enterprise system and racism are inextricably intertwined. We don't believe that to be the case. It certainly isn't the case in most parts of the world that I've had experience. But it's a difficult thing to demonstrate to the workers here because of their experience over many years.

BUERK [voice-over]: After a decade building up their strength on the shop floor and four years of prickly negotiations amongst themselves, union delegates registered to launch the new federation. It would have 33 unions under its wing, half a million worker-members, and political ambitions. Until now the unions have generally kept their heads down while the state suppressed wilder and more outspoken opposition organizations. Those who have watched the unions grow from their cautious beginnings feel the government have been outmaneuvered.

CLIVE THOMSON, labor lawyer: The trade union movement has exploited the gaps presented by that labor law. It has moved in and made considerable advances in limited areas, from legal perspectives, such as unfair dismissal, collective bargaining rights, industrial action rights and so on. And it has used these legal rights as platforms to mobilize to a degree which the state probably never anticipated when it ushered in the new labor dispensation. So that it exploited the new situation to the hilt in their drive to mobilize, in a general sense, the industrial workers of South Africa.

BUERK [voice-over]: Not all the unions were represented. Chris Dlamini took his union in, but a federation open to all races was opposed by the black consciousness unions, who stayed away. Nonetheless, it's the largest workers' movement in the country's history, with a level of organization no other quipped with radios carrying translations of the proceedings in four languages, English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa. The man who runs the biggest union in the most important industry set the federation's political line in the opening session.

CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, Mineworkers' Union: We all agree that the struggle of workers on the shop floor cannot be separated from the wider political struggle for liberation in this country. What workers are fighting for on the shop floor is not very different from what the communities are fighting for in the townships. Our politics as workers should eventually be the politics of the oppressed people of this country. What we have to make clear to all and sundry is that a giant has risen, and this giant is going to confront all and sundry who seek and want to stand in its way. Because this Congress of South African Trade Unions is not going to stand for any form of opposition or defeat.

BUERK [voice-over]: Clive Thomson thinks the risk of confrontation with government has been carefully calculated.

Mr. THOMSON: The trade unions have been skilled enough -- they are very good survivors, they've had a long training period over the last decade or so -- they will not easily allow themselves to be overexposed. I see this continuing in the future where they'll play a very careful strategy of consolidating their power on one hand and selecting the targets for concerted action to bring about social change on the other.

BUERK [voice-over]: The 900 delegates at the inaugural conference felt able to agree about many issues that had divided them in the past. Those who'd concentrated on shop-floor matters felt the current troubles here demanded they should be more politically active. The politically militant wanted to strengthen factory floor support for the struggles ahead. The launch was orchestrated to give the appearance of maximum unity, particularly the election of the federation's leadership. That reflected the power and confidence of the bigger unions. The man chosen to be president came from the mineworkers.

MAN: E. Barayi, Elijah Barayi, has been duly elected as the first president of COSATU.

BUERK [voice-over]: Elijah Barayi is a seasoned political figure from an older generation. Chris Dlamini was elected first vice president. He like the rest of the federation's executive committee is 20 years younger than their president, the men who will pull the strings while the old warhorse makes the running. In vigorous and uncompromising Xhosa, he did just that, launching into a list of a political demands.

ELIJAH BARAYI, Congress of Trade Unions [through interpreter]: I've got this message to the South African government. I want to say, you Boers, your time is over as from today.

BUERK [voice-over]: Behind the euphoria there is much shrewd political calculation. Behind the rhetoric, a program to assume the dominant role in black opposition politics. The time, they say, is ripe.

Mr. THOMSON: At the moment we're in a stage of a low-intensity civil war. It looks very much as if that civil war is going to intensify in the months ahead, almost inevitably. If that is the case, the federation will be part of that confrontation, and I do certainly expect there to be clashes and confrontations in the months to come.

BUERK [voice-over]: The trade unions have a power base, an organization, a cohesion other black opposition groups often conspicuously lack. They've learned patience and planning, where many other protest movements in the townships have lapsed into anarchy. COSATU has adopted a platform condemning almost every aspect of apartheid and setting time limits for radical change. That this will bring it into conflict with the state seems inevitable. How they handle that conflict will be the union's greatest test.

MacNEIL: That report was by Michael Buerk of the BBC. Ricky Nelson: An American Dream

LEHRER: Finally tonight, Rick Nelson, the son of Ozzie and Harriet, once the singing idol of millions. He died in a plane crash last week. His death triggered these thoughts from our regular essayist Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: What accounts for the special sadness brought by Ricky Nelson's death? That it revived our nostalgia for the good first days of television? In part. That he was always a nice clean kid, even into manhood? That too, surely. That the adventures of Ozzie and Harriet created a world so sweet and easy that one felt becalmed merely to be in the family's company those 14 years, from Ike to Vietnam.

[clip from "Ozzie and Harriet"]

OZZIE: Where did you meet this girl, Rick? Was she one of the customers?

RICKY: Yeah, she came to the door at one of the houses where I was delivering milk.

DAVE: He can't really say he met her; he didn't even get her name.

OZZIE: Oh, hi, Dave, what are you doing here?

DAVE: Oh, I just dropped by to say hello and steal a couple of steaks out of the freezer.

OZZIE: Well, good for you.

ROSENBLATT: Those were the days. Every Friday night brought to you by Kodak, the picture-book Nelsons mowed the lawn, shot hoop in the driveway, baked brownies, poured milk, a sea of milk, and fretted about surprise parties. Nobody soothed us better. Ozzie Nelson had Ronald Reagan's voice long before that voice was elected president. And in the center, Ricky, the safe rock-and-roll star -- Elvis without hips. The cool, untroubled eyes, the low-key wit. Your son, your daughter's date. Maybe that accounts for the special sadness now, the idea of losing one of our own.

But the sadness goes deeper, too. In a way, we were responsible for Ricky Nelson's life, for wishing into existence an image of American boyhood that he filled so perfectly. Ricky was real, yet he satisfied something unreal in that image. He made himself a fiction. How the nation ate him up. He was the best of American averageness. Hints of spirit, but no rebellions. And nothing ethnic -- that was a great relief. The old ethnic radio shows failed on television once they could be seen. "Amos 'n Andy," "Life with Luigi," "The Goldbergs" -- the old neighborhoods receded into the past, into the dark of the cities, and out into the bright blue suburbs drove the Nelsons, new America. They settled and prevailed. Ricky prevailed.

The odd thing is, we never really believed in Ricky. He was a handsome pretense, an insincere wish to keep up our spirits. It's what we tend to do with images of America: set things up we do not believe in, honor them, sometimes make them rich, and blow them away, often with a vengeance. Who would really seek to be the average American boy? Who would model his life on harmlessness? Yet Ricky was the model we said we sought, because we so desperately wanted to disengage ourselves from those old neighborhoods, to find the pure, ideal homogenization. Goodbye, Amos, Luigi, Molly; hello, milk. Nobody wanted to be Ricky; we just wanted Ricky to be. Because the image was easy, soothing. Because the real American dream remains a mystery. After all these years we still step off the boat, lay down our bags, stare into the wilderness and fake it.

We do not yet know our country. We pretend to know it from time to time, because we feel that by now we ought to be sure of our future. But in fact, all the images we invent, like Ricky Nelson, are mere clamorings for a reality not yet clearly viewed. We wish so hard to see America. The American novel. The American way. The American house, face. Chrysler -- the pride is back. Some days you can almost hear us collectively wish those invented images into a stable form. All the picnics and county fairs and Fourths of July solidified, declaring themselves one nation. But the real nation is slippery, far more complicated than our invented pictures. A country that comes from everywhere in the world, bears everything in the world and will not mow lawns for a living.

So we make ourselves images to make ourselves happy. We made Ricky Nelson, who in turn made himself ours according to national specifications. And we encouraged him, for we had no clearer dream to pin our hopes on. But we did not mean it. When Ricky Nelson left television he departed our approval. The image was removed from the image box. What we may miss most in his passing is the life we do not yet have as a country, the death of someone not yet born. Where is the all-American boy? What color, size and shape is he? Is he a he? Not long ago we stared into the dream, simplified matters and called it Ricky.

MacNEIL: And now tonight's Lurie cartoon -- a look at the Libyan sanctions and the reluctant allies.

[Ranon Lurie cartoon -- Reagan and Shultz on one continent, allies dog on the other. Reagan and Shultz try to pull dog over the divide, but choke it.]

LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday. President Reagan asked Congress to exempt military personnel costs from the automatic budget-cutting process. British Prime Minister Thatcher said a firm no to join in the U.S. sanction move against Libya, but Italy did say it would stop selling arms to Libya, and this evening Canada announced it would cut off government aid to firms doing business with Libya. The flight of space shuttle Columbia was postponed for the seventh time. There will be another try on Sunday.

Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: Good night, Jim. That's our NewsHour tonight. We will be back on Monday night. Have a nice weekend. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.