United States v. Carlton E. Bryant, United States of America v. William E. Turner

J. SKELLY WRIGHT, Circuit Judge:

These cases point up an anomaly of our criminal process: controlled by rules of law protecting adversary rights and procedures at some stages, the process at other stages is thoroughly unstructured. Beside the carefully safeguarded fairness of the. courtroom is a dark no-man’s-land of unreviewed bureaucratic and discretionary decision making. Too often, what the process purports to secure in its formal stages can be subverted or diluted in its more informal stages. That, we are told, is what happened here.

The right at stake in the cases before us is defendant’s…