PART FOUR • THE FOURTH ESCAPE
The song went on and on, the verses were endless. But then so were the writs that were being sung about. Despite the look of it, “The Affirm-the-Order, No-Opinion Blues” is not a complaint against the judges; it is the lament of the unschooled inmate who, having taken note of the revolution being wrought by the Supreme Court, has been whipping in his briefs for a habeas corpus hearing based upon his wholly erroneous interpretations of the new rulings. What the revolution did, to oversimplify this somewhat, was to permit prisoners who had been convicted in state courts to come into the federal courts, via the use of a habeas corpus, wherever they could claim that a Constitutional right had been abridged.
这首歌不停地播放着，歌词没完没了，当时传唱的诉讼状也是这样。尽管表面上看，“确认秩序，没有抑郁的意见”并不是对法官的抱怨；这是一名未受教育的囚犯的挽歌，他注意到最高法院正在进行的革命，一直在根据基于新裁决对他完全错误的解释之上，在人身保护令的听证会上，这些匆匆塞进有关他的简报。革命所做的，在某种程度上过于简化了这一点，是允许在州法院被定罪的囚犯通过人身保护令进入联邦法院，只要他们能声称自身的宪法权利被削减。
To make sure these claims were heard, the Supreme Court made it mandatory for the federal district judges (and, by extension, all judges, everywhere) to accept the application and rule on it, not just turn it down out-of-hand, as they had been doing in about ninety-five percent of the cases. And that meant all writs. Whether it was a legal brief perfectly drawn by a prestigious law firm or an illiterate plea scrawled on a sheet of paper by the prisoner himself.
为了确保这些宣称被听取，最高法院强制联邦地区法官(以及其他地方的所有法官)需要接受申请并对此作出裁决，而不是像他们在95%的案件中所做的那样，直接拒绝。这意味着所有的令状。无论是一份由知名律师事务所完美起草的法律摘要，还是囚犯自己在一张纸上，潦草地写下的不识字的抗辩书，都可以生效。
As you can imagine, the writs hit the fan. So much so that Justice FelixFrankfurter was moved to remark, “We would like to help those who have valid questions of law to place before the Court, but we have now reached the point where we do not know what points of law are being contested.”
正如你所能想象的，诉状如雪花般散开。法兰克福特法官甚至说: “我们愿意帮助那些对法律的正确性有疑问的人提交法院，但是我们现在已经到了这样一个地步，即我们不知道对哪些法律观点有争议。”
When the flood of writs reached such proportions that the judges no longer had time to explain to every prisoner why he didn’t know what he was talking about, they began to send back the petitions with the simple notation, “Affirm the Order, no Opinion.” The inmates would then stand around and bitch and moan, coming up with all kinds of reasons why the goddamn judge hadn’t given their petition the attention it so obviously merited.
当大量的诉讼文书堆积如山，法官们再也没有时间向每一个囚犯询问，为何他们都不知道自己在说些什么，他们开始用简单的记号把请愿书寄回去，“确认命令，不发表意见。”狱友们就会站在一旁抱怨，想出各种各样的理由，为什么该死的法官，没有给予他们如此明显的请愿书给予关注。
1. The judge was so busy that he hadn’t bothered to read it.
2. The judge didn’t know the law.
3. The judge had been afraid that if he granted the petition and eventually had to let the petitioner go, a lot of other, obviously less deserving prisoners would also have to be let go.
And so they would whip up another writ and send it on to the next highest court, hoping to get a favorable ruling from there or, at the very least, an explanation.
For in rewriting the trial procedures and the rules of evidence, the Supreme Court was also doing something else. By giving every prisoner hope, they were changing the prison system.
1.法官忙得连看都懒得看。
2.法官不懂法律。
3.法官一直担心，如果他批准了请愿书，最终不得不释放请愿者，许多其他显然不那么值得释放的囚犯，也会因此而被释放。
因此，他们会起草另一份令状，将其递交给下一个最高法院，希望从那里得到有利的裁决，或者至少得到一个解释。
因为在重写审判程序和证据规则时，最高法院还在做别的事情。通过给每个囚犯希望，他们正在改变监狱的系统。
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