March|April 2004

LISTENING TO LINDBERGH

I don't argue with the conclusions of Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma in their article "Falling on Deaf Ears," (November | December), regarding the unreliability of earwitness accounts. Their stress on Charles Lindbergh's identification of Bruno Hauptmann's voice at the trial for the kidnap and murder of Lindbergh's son, however, is so misleading that it undermines their thesis.

The authors make it seem as if Hauptmann was convicted on Lindbergh's questionable voice identification alone. Hardly! The ladder used to climb into Lindbergh's home was made of floorboards torn out of Hauptmann's attic; misspellings in the ransom letter ("boad" instead of "boat") were characteristic of his writing; he had encoded his own name in the note; and he was caught spending the ransom. Any single item of evidence would be insufficient to convict, but collectively the weight of this evidence was crushing.

To imply that a single witness's say-so about the voice of the accused sent an innocent man to the gallows is just plain wrong. So wrong that it makes one wonder, fairly or not, how off-base their other inferences and conclusions may be as well.

A. C. Willment
Ridgewood, N.J.


NOT SO FAST, FLEISS

I just read Heidi Fleiss's "In Defense of Prostitution" (September | October), and the steam is still coming out of my ears—and not because her article was such hot stuff.

My personal experience of top-dollar prostitution is quite limited, so I will not quarrel with Fleiss's description of her "girls" as well-paid, well-protected happy hookers who dropped their knickers solely to fund their college studies. But I take vigorous exception to her description of prostitution as a victimless crime.

For 10 years, I lived in a neighborhood that was frequented by sex workers. Virtually all of the women were addicted to drugs, as were many of their clients, and I often found condoms and syringes in the alleys, and even in our backyards. Because the johns lacked the financial resources of, say, Charlie Sheen, they often turned to armed robbery and burglary to finance their frolics.

It was clear that many of the women were not merely exercising their right to do what they wanted with their bodies. It also was clear that they were not using prostitution to fund education or career goals. On one memorable day I called the police to report what I thought was a child abduction. A neighbor who saw the incident at closer hand told the cops that the "child" was really a petite prostitute trying to escape her "manager." When the police realized the victim was a sex worker and not a child, they lost interest in the case; such incidents were too common in the sex trade to elicit official concern.

Fleiss argues that such problems would vanish if prostitution were legalized. But her fantasies of a free-market sexual utopia are contradicted by the realities of legal prostitution in other countries. In the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, there have been reports of sexual indentured servitude, and tourists are warned of the high crime in Amsterdam's red-light district.

What makes Fleiss think legalized prostitution in the United States would be any different?

Elizabeth Austin
Oak Park, Ill.