Counter to the Current

The Supreme Court is generally thought to be drifting toward the right, but last week four of its actions left liberals little cause for complaint. > Busing to promote integration in Southern school districts was approved unanimously by the court last term. The rationale: busing is sometimes necessary and constitutionally proper to undo state and local actions that have fostered illegal segregation. But is mandatory busing legal outside the South in areas where formal school-segregation policies have not existed? By way of answer to that question, the court declined without comment to interfere with a lower court ruling that requires busing in Pontiac, Mich. In 1970, Federal District Judge Damon J. Keith found that the Pontiac school board had "intentionally utilized the power at its disposal to locate new schools and arrange new boundaries in such a way as to perpetuate the pattern of segregation." Judge Keith's decision prompted violence and continuing resistance, but he was upheld by a court of appeals. And the Supreme Court's unwillingness to review the case left ample room for other federal judges to follow Keith's lead. >Southern desegregation was also aided by the court. The state of Virginia had wanted to expand the two-year program of its predominantly white Richard Bland College to four years. But the community of Petersburg, where Bland is located, already has a four-year school, Virginia State College, which is predominantly black. Both colleges were once officially segregated, and a special three-judge district court barred Eland's expansion on the grounds that it would undercut efforts to integrate Virginia State. The Supreme Court agreed. It also let stand a lower court ruling that forbade Brighton, Ala., to sell an abandoned junior high school building to a group intending to establish a whites-only private academy. The sale, the lower court said, would encourage racial discrimination.

>Parolees are almost as bereft of rights as prisoners. So lower federal courts declined to intervene when Raymond Arciniega's parole was revoked. After serving nearly eight years of his ten-year sentence for selling heroin, Arciniega went to work booking acts into a Torrance, Calif., nightspot. Unfortunately for him, two other ex-convicts also worked there, and his parole board decided that he was violating the rule against associating with former prisoners. The Supreme Court unanimously found that conclusion unacceptable. Occupational association is not enough to send a man back to prison, said the court. "To so assume would be to render a parolee vulnerable whenever his employer, willing to hire ex-convicts, hires more than one." The court reaffirmed the broad powers of parole boards to set conditions of release, but its ruling nonetheless was an indication that such actions of the boards are not beyond judicial scrutiny.

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