Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...STATE of Alabama executed John Evans last Friday night. For Evans, a convicted murderer, that execution was anything but painless. Even if one can temporarily disregard the mental anguish associated with any execution, the physical pain must have been terrible. It required three 30-second blasts of electricity at 1900 volts to kill Evans over a 10-minute period--a long time in which to carry out any kind of execution...
Advocates of capital punishment now have a new responsibility to defend this or any other method of execution as humane in light of what happened in Alabama. That the state had tested the electric chair is of comparatively little importance. How does one "test" an electric chair in any case? As with any complex piece of machinery, the only real "test" is actual...
Pepper cannot really explain how he managed to grow up uninfected by the redneck racism prevalent in the Alabama farm country where he was born in 1900. "Why, I was full grown," says Pepper, the eldest of four children, "before I ever traveled on a paved road." Whatever the reason, he felt the stir of ambition early on: at the tender age often, he carved the words CLAUDE PEPPER, UNITED STATES SENATOR on a tree...
Pepper entered the University of Alabama in the fall of 1918. To help pay his way, he worked from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. hauling coal and ashes at a power plant. He starred on the debating team, ran on the track squad, made Phi Beta Kappa, but lost his first election: for student-body president. When his oratorical skills took him to a contest in Chapel Hill, N.C., "it was the farthest north I had ever been...
...shouldn't I go to the best law school there is?" he asked himself. He applied to Harvard, was admitted and got tuition, books and $100 a month support money from the Veterans Administration. The reason: during his brief Army service, spent training at the University of Alabama, he suffered an injury that developed into a double hernia. Pepper's appreciation for both education and a benevolent Uncle Sam was never to leave him: "I get so burned up when anybody tries to cut back on the money available to help needy students...