I wondered why it is that the westerns survive year after year. Perhaps one of the reasons, in addition to the excitement, the gunplay and the rest—and this may be a square observation—the good guys come out ahead in the westerns, the bad guys lose. In the end, as [Chisum] particularly pointed out, even in the old West there was a time when there was no law. But the law eventually came, and the law was important from the standpoint of not only prosecuting the guilty, but also seeing that those who were guilty had a proper trial.
THE words were those of President Richard Nixon, offered in a week to make anyone nostalgic for the simple but mythologized world of the classic American western. The orderly administration of justice took a beating, and even the President inadvertently contributed in a small way. With a slip of the tongue, he passed judgment on a man on trial for his life in California: Charles Manson, accused of masterminding the gruesome 1969 Sharon Tate murders. Four days later, a California superior court judge, kidnaped from his courtroom, died along with three of his captors in a grisly gun battle with police. Black Panther Huey Newton, freed on $50,000 bail while awaiting a new trial for voluntary manslaughter, had absurdly venomous words for the system that had jailed him and then set him free. To a crowd of at least 500 clenched-fist supporters in Oakland, he shouted: "The Gestapo has promised that they will crush us!" Appropriately enough, at a meeting of state chief justices in St. Louis, Chief Justice Warren Burger pleaded for order in the court. Traditional courtroom discipline, he said, is "the absolutely imperative lubricant for an inherently contentious process."
Burger made his appeal for decency on the day of the California kidnaping, the most bizarre affront to justice in a long time. Jonathon Jackson, 17, brother of a black accused of racial killings in a Soledad, Calif, prison, walked into the Marin County Hall of Justice in San Rafael, 15 miles north of San Francisco. Judge Harold Haley, 65, was presiding over the trial of James McClain, accused of stabbing a San Quentin prison guard while serving a sentence for burglary. Other San Quentin inmates were on hand as witnesses. Ruchell Magee, 31, was inside the courtroom; William Christmas, 27, was under guard in the corridor outside.
Taped Shotgun. Jackson sat down among the spectators for a few minutes. Then suddenly he opened a satchel, drew out a pistol and tossed it to McClain. He pulled a carbine out from under his raincoat and ordered: "Freeze!" McClain held the pistol against Judge Haley's head. Magee slipped outside and freed Christmas, bringing him into the courtroom. While a bailiff sneaked outside to alert police, one of the men picked up a telephone in the courtroom and forced Judge Haley to call the sheriff's office. McClain reportedly demanded: "Call off your pigs or we'll kill everyone in the room." To keep Judge Haley in tow as their principal hostage, one gunman fastened a sawed-off shotgun to his neck with adhesive tape so that the muzzle hung a few inches from Haley's chin. They tied together with piano wire four other hostages, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas and three women jurors.