Unit 3 Discussion Points

Task 1. Discuss the following points with your fellow students:

1. Hardships of a witness

2. Protection of a witness

3. Violation of constitutional rights of a witness

4. Necessity of witnesses’ cooperation

Task 2. Give a short newspaper review on your experience as a witness (or somebody else’s). Remember that your interview should appeal to the interests of the interested readers. It can be neutral, emotional, and descriptive. Prove your point of view.

Task 3. Work in pairs. Discuss any of problems witnesses face today. You may speak about delays, threats, abuse, and lack of information and so on. One of the students is supposed to introduce a subject of mutual interest; the other student disagrees or agrees with his partner’s point of view.

Task 4. Speak on the topic: “No fair trial is possible without witnesses ”

Task 6. Team work. Case Study: The following situations are based on real cases from the federal courts. Consider the arguments, and then decide how you would rule. Compare your answers with actual case results.

Mrs. Jones was an outspoken high-school English teacher. During a private meeting with the principal over school poli­cies, she lost her temper and called him several names in a loud voice.

The next day the principal fired her. She filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming the school violated her right of free speech. "A public employee cannot be fired for ex­pressing her views," Mrs. Jones's lawyer told the judge.

The school-board attorney said the suit should be dismissed. "The right of free speech applies only in public places, not in private meetings," he said. "Besides, she deserved to be fired for being disre­spectful to her boss."

Should Mrs. Jones get her job back?

Chapter 6. “Paper People”: The Hidden Plague unit 1. Giving the summary of the text Text 1

Task 1. Answer the questions:

1. Why do people forge documents?

2. Is it easy to tell the original document from a counterfeit one?

3. Who uses counterfeit documents?

Task 2. Read the text to get the main idea paying special attention to the underlined parts of the text (key words and word combinations)

The smiling young woman endorsed the check "Cynthia L. Thomas" and handed it to the assistant manager of the Los Angeles supermarket. He immedi­ately recognized it as a payroll check of the nearby Western Gillette Trucking Co. "Do you have" any identification. Miss Thomas?" She opened her wallet, bulging with credit cards, and handed him a Cali­fornia driver's license bearing her signature, color photo and thumb-print. "Thank you." Transaction completed. And Cynthia Thomas went to her car with $242.

But her name wasn't Cynthia Thomas. It was Patty Bledsoe, and in her purse was a sheaf of counterfeit Western Gillette payroll checks, all in the amount of $242, payable to four different people. And for each name Patty Bledsoe had proper "I.D." — credit cards, driver's license, and Social Security card. These "proofs" of identity weren't stolen, and they weren't forged. They were the real thing — real enough for Patty, on this one weekend, to cash worthless checks totaling $17,000.

By the time the checks began bouncing Monday morning, Patty and boy friend Robert Hinckley were en route to Colombia where, with the weekend "stake," they bought three kilos of cocaine. Using fraudulent U.S. passports (as up to 80 percent of all hard-drug smug­glers do), they re-entered the Unit­ed States and sold the cocaine for more than $30,000.

Bledsoe and Hinckley understood that in today's world you can "create" a person on paper. This knowledge provided them a continued livelihood until they were found dead in an apartment near Lake Tahoe in the spring of 1974 — an apparent murder-suicide. Investigators found with them the evidence of their many identities — licenses, passports, credit cards, detailed charts on which they had kept records of which aliases had been used when and where; what credit cards had been "burnt out" and which ones could be used for the next foray.

Patty Bledsoe and Robert Hinckley left only one small footprint on the path of crime beaten across America by tens of thousands of "paper peo­ple." For the past year an 80-member federal panel, composed of government experts, law-enforcement officials and representatives of the business community, privacy groups and the public, has been studying ways to combat the problem with­out jeopardizing individual privacy. Says David Muchow, the Justice Department attorney who heads the Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification: "We're talking of more than ten billion dollars in yearly losses in which false I.D. plays a part."