And on June 29, 1971, even as he was hooked up with a colostomy bag and was hauling two large, black-leather valises, he entered the Senate on a new mission against that war.

“I went onto the floor with the flight bags and put them next to my chair,” says Gravel. “Muskie comes over to me and asks, ‘What the hell have you got there? The Pentagon Papers?’ ”

Maine Senator Ed Muskie was on target. Daniel Ellsberg had given Gravel the top-secret Pentagon study detailing government deception in the Vietnam War, which had been published a few days earlier in The New York Times. But the Nixon Justice Department had then shut down further publication with a prior restraint order.

Without a quorum, Gravel was forced into a basement conference room for an emergency session of his Building and Grounds Committee. Gravel read from the Papers until just after midnight on June 30, when he broke down in tears, emotionally distraught over what his country was doing in Vietnam. He de facto declassified more than 4,000 pages. Later that day, the Supreme Court reversed the prior restraint against all publishers but indicated that they would be at risk if they continued to publish.

His greatest triumph in this line was several leaks in March, 1968, to Neil Sheehan, then a Times reporter, of documents suggesting that the American military leadership had regularly given President Johnson misleadingly optimistic reports about how the war was going. Within two weeks, Johnson announced that he would halt American bombing above the 20th Parallel, begin peace talks, and not run for [re-election]; it looked as if Ellsberg had almost single-handedly engineered the beginning of the end of the war. But the war didn't end, and Ellsberg started down a path that led to the Pentagon Papers.

What finally ended this double life, and made Ellsberg world famous rather than just well connected, was his decision to leak a seven-thousand-page history of how the Vietnam War was planned, which the Pentagon had prepared for internal use.

Haig: Sir, it, uh – the whole study that was done for McNamara, and then carried on after McNamara left by Clifford, and the peaceniks over there ... This is a devastating – uh, security breach, of – of the greatest magnitude of anything I've ever seen.

Kissinger: In public opinion, it actually, if anything, will help us a little bit, because this is a gold mine of showing how the previous administration got us in there.

Nixon: I didn't read the thing – [unclear] give me your view on that – in – in a word.

Kissinger: It just shows massive mismanagement of how we got there, and it [unclear] pins it all on Kennedy and Johnson.

Nixon: Well you know – uh, [stammering] it may not have the effect they inten – they – the thing though that Henry – that to me is just unconscionable – this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.
[...]
Kissinger: It's – it's treasonable, there's no question – it's actionable, I'm absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.

Haldeman: Well this thing too is clear, it seems to me it – it hurts us in that it puts the war back up into a high [unclear] tension level, but the facts in it

Nixon: Hurt the other side

Haldeman: Don't hurt us politically so much – they hurt the others – but what they really hurt – and this is what the intellectuals – and why the motivation of the Times must be is that it hurts the government. What it says is – Rumsfeld was making this point this mornoing – what—what it says is – to the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.
[...]
Nixon: Yeah, but on the other hand [unclear] – this is a bunch of God-damn left-wingers who are trying to destroy [unclear]

Much to their chagrin, of course, after the full hearing on Friday 18 June, Gurfein issued a ringing opinion withdrawing the temporary order, writing that “A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know. These are troubled times. There is no greater safety valve for discontent and cynicism about the affairs of government than freedom of expression in any form.... No cogent reasons were advanced as to why these documents except in the general framework of embarrassment... would vitally affect the security of the nation.”

At the very moment that Gurfein was holding his full hearing on Friday, 18 June, the Washington Post came out with its first publication of the Papers, obtained from Daniel Ellsberg by Post editor Ben Bagdikian while the Times was enjoined from publishing. So the government went to court in Washington D.C., before District Judge Gerhard Gesell. At one point in the Washington case, the government tried to submit a sealed affidavit to Gesell (from National Security Agency director Admiral Noel Gayler) while claiming it was too secret to show the Post’s attorneys. As William Glendon relates, Gesell told the government if the document was too secret to share with the Post, it was too secret to share with the court. Gesell ultimately ruled against any injunction, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed with him; but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Gurfein’s ruling; and the case rocketed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

(c) The decision in Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U.S. 478, stressed the need for protective devices to make the process of police interrogation conform to the dictates of the privilege.

We dealt with certain phases of this problem recently in Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U.S. 478 (1964). There, as in the four cases before us, law enforcement officials took the defendant into custody and interrogated him in a police station for the purpose of obtaining a confession. The police did not effectively advise him of his right to remain silent or of his right to consult with his attorney. Rather, they confronted him with an alleged accomplice who accused him of having perpetrated a murder. When the defendant denied the accusation and said "I didn't shoot Manuel, you did it," they handcuffed him and took him to an interrogation room. There, while handcuffed and standing, he was questioned for four hours until he confessed. During this interrogation, the police denied his request to speak to his attorney, and they prevented his retained attorney, who had come to the police station, from consulting with him. At his trial, the State, over his objection, introduced the confession against him. We held that the statements thus made were constitutionally inadmissible.

In 1965, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear Miranda's case. At the same time, the Court agreed to hear three similar cases, Vignera v. New York, Westover v. United States, and California v. Stewart. The Court combined the four cases. Since Miranda was listed first among the four cases considered by the Court, the decision came to be known by that name. The decision in Miranda v. Arizona was handed down in 1966.

In 1933 the NAACP undertook Hocutt v. Wilson, the first test case involving segregation in higher education. The plaintiff was Thomas R. Hocutt, a student at the North Carolina College for Negroes, who had been denied admission to the University of North Carolina's School of Pharmacy.

Physicians told police that Patty had traces of semen inside her, but disputed the girl’s claim that prior to the assault she had been a virgin.
[...]
First, one brother-in-law told investigators, Patty was somewhat emotionally disabled, having a measured intelligence of a 12- or 13-year-old.

As a punishment in school, Thurgood was sent to the school basement to memorize the United States Constitution. He was confused because some of the ideas in the Constitution were not true in his life. His father said the Constitution was about the way things should be, not the way things were.

After graduation, Marshall pursued admission to law school. His first choice was the University of Maryland Law School. Marshall’s application to Maryland was rejected because of the University’s “all-white” admission policy. So, he matriculated at Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. It was at Howard where Marshall met Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of the law school. Houston was Marshall’s mentor until his death in 1950. As the Dean of the law school, Houston emphasized to Thurgood and other students that lawyers should be social engineers. It was Dean Houston who taught Marshall the strategy of using existing laws to defeat racial discrimination.

Arguing the position of the United States government, dressed in the traditional gray striped pants and morning coat, was Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall, the former NAACP attorney who successfully argued the Brown v. Board of Education case and who would later be the nation’s first black justice. Marshall’s job was to state the position of the U.S. Attorney General and the government of the United States on questions involving Constitutional matters.
[...]
The last man to present a position in the case before the court was Thurgood Marshall, whose personal opinions were diametrically opposed to the position of his employer, the U.S. government."

For example, when he was asked for a definition of "equal" by Justice Frankfurter, Marshall replied, "equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place” (Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955)).