All the while, the Kennedy White House was confronted with an uprising in the South as African Americans took to the streets to demand that Washington live up to its rhetoric about the importance of freedom and liberty.
Kennedy tookthe due-process argument to heart, rooting his analysis in the right to a zone of personal liberty into which the government may not intrude.
But late last month U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven overturned his most important conviction that of delivering cocaine and in so doing took a giant step in re-asserting one ofthe fundamental (but often under-recognized) principles assuring thelibertyof Americans: the notion that the criminal justice system can punish us only if it can be proven that we knowingly and hence intentionally committed a crime.