Fifty years ago, on March 13, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Klopfer v. North Carolina, in which it held that the speedy trial guarantee of the Sixth Amendment applies to the states.1 Klopfer is the story of a man of conscience—Duke University zoologist Peter Klopfer—and a court committed to imposing federal constitutional standards in criminal procedure on the states.
Klopfer’s Background
Peter Klopfer was raised in suburban Philadelphia in a devoutly Quaker family. “We spent many hours in meetings,” he would write, “where the problems of the world were reviewed and individual responsibility for each assigned, always in the context of worshipful meditation.”2 Klopfer attended UCLA but was expelled his freshman year for protesting the school’s ROTC requirement. Eventually reinstated and exempted from the requirement, he did well enough to be accepted into a Ph.D. program in ethology (the study of animal behavior) at Yale.
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