Chicago v. Escobedo

"The Police Department is out to get Danny Escobedo," charged Lawyer Marshall Schwarzbach in a Chicago courtroom last week. The police, he said, have made Danny (TIME cover, April 29) their "most hated person" because they resent the 1964 Supreme Court decision that voided his murder admission (Escobedo v. Illinois) and set the stage for last June's decision to apply the rights of silence and counsel to all police interrogation (Miranda v. Arizona).

Schwarzbach's argument helped convince a Chicago jury that it should acquit Escobedo of unlawful use of weapons. Last March, as he was sitting in his car outside a restaurant where one of his friends got into a brawl, Danny himself was arrested for disorderly conduct and charged with having a loaded pistol under the front seat. But, testified Danny, he had lawfully bought the gun in his own name, and was simply transporting it. Besides, it was broken into four parts, wrapped in a rag under the seat, and therefore was a non-weapon.

The jury believed Danny last week, just as another Chicago jury had cleared him of drug charges in 1965, apparently accepting his claim that the police got an addict to hand him some "goofballs" on a street corner. The police, though, are not yet through with Escobedo, who lost his last job as a truck loader because of his troubles. In November, he was arrested for burglary and disorderly conduct, after a policeman found him urinating under a porch near a just-robbed Chicago restaurant. He now faces trial on those charges, forcing yet another jury to ponder the endless case of the police v. Escobedo.

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