Earl Warren

"The use of involuntary verbal confessions in criminal trials," Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote 40 years ago, "is constitutionally obnoxious not only because of their unreliability. They are inadmissible under the Due Process Clause even though the statements in them may be independently established. Coerced confessions offend a community's sense of fair play and decency."Felix Frankfurter is widely regarded as the patron saint of all conservative justices, but this week five justices who call themselves "conservatives" rejected the reasoning enunciated by Frankfurter.

Eric Ambler, 89, a pioneering author of modern thrillers and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, died Thursday at his London apartment. Among the best-known of his 21 published books are "Epitaph for a Spy" in 1938, "The Mask of Dimitrios" in 1939, "Journey into Fear" in 1940, and "The Schirmer Inheritance" in 1953."

BELTSVILLE -- Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision yesterday, President Clinton visited a middle school named after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., where Mr. Clinton played the roles of teacher and mentor."

Thomas H. Kuchel, 84, a progressive U.S. senator who served four years as Republican whip but refused to endorse conservative candidates such as Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, died of cancer Monday in Los Angeles. He was appointed to the Senate in 1952 by Gov. Earl Warren to finish the term of Mr. Nixon, who had been elected vice president. During his 16 years in the Senate, Mr. Kuchel supported civil rights bills and desegregation of public facilities. In 1965, he was one of about a dozen Republican senators who helped push through passage of Medicare.

The legal dueling at the O.J. Simpson hearing this week has focused on whether certain evidence against him could be suppressed under the "exclusionary rule." That rule says evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment ("search and seizure") can be excluded from a trial. Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell's ruling yesterday that the evidence can be used could determine whether Mr. Simpson goes to trial. A similar ruling at a trial would almost surely be the subject of appeals.This is fueling public debate about the wisdom of the exclusionary rule.

JOHN DALY, a former war correspondent and game-show host, is dead at age 77. His long-time assistant said yesterday that Daly was found dead Sunday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. Although he suffered from emphysema, Lila Bader said, "I believe death was due to cardiac arrest."In a telephone interview from Daly's office in New York, Bader said she spoke with Daly by telephone Sunday, "and he was going to do his taxes" on Monday.A native of South Africa, Daly moved to the United States as a boy. He studied at Boston College and was a scheduler for the Washington, D.C., transit company when he joined CBS in 1937.

HOLLYWOOD -- Aubrey Rike is a former funeral parlor worker, the man who, in November 1963, put President Kennedy's slain body into the casket at Parkland Hospital. Today, he is a Dallas policeman who was recently hired as a consultant on Oliver Stone's latest project "JFK" -- a dramatic exploration of the assassination, which the director calls "the seminal event of our generation."At one point, Rike recalls, he pointed out a couple of minor factual errors in the way Stone was setting up a scene: Mrs. Kennedy had not been in the emergency room at a given time; her clothes were less blood-stained.

THE SENSE of deja vu is overwhelming.The parallels in the two situations are chilling.But will the endings of each be happily similar or tragically different?We have two middle-sized cities in America's midsection. In each, mobs of howling protesters block access to buildings, intent on turning away people who want to exercise their constitutional rights.Federal judges issue orders that law-enforcement officials clear the entrances of the demonstrators and bar public officials from interfering.

Washington -- Oliver Stone's movie, ''JFK,'' will give paranoia a bad name and give us all pause. Viewing his travesty about the Kennedy assassination makes one wonder what Mr. Stone would have thought about the century's most consequential assassination.On June 28, 1914, six young men were poised in Sarajevo, Bosnia, to throw bombs at the car of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Five of them, intimidated by the crowds or unwilling to hurt the archduke's wife, did nothing. However, one asked a policeman which car was the archduke's, the policeman identified it and the boy threw his bomb, which bounced off the archduke's car and exploded under the following car.One of the others, Gavrilo Princip, went off disconsolately for coffee at a corner cafe, where he loitered.

ASSUMING you are reading enough about Topic A elsewhere, did you ever hear about the time Jimmy Roosevelt tried to beat up Mendel Rivers during a debate in the House of Representatives?But first -- this week, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. refused to enter the presidential race (Topic B). He owes his prominence in large part to his name. If Albert Gore Sr. had not been a senator, there might never have been a Senator Gore Jr.Having a famous father or grandfather or uncle in politics has always been helpful -- at the congressional level.