Word: amsterdams
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Defense attorneys for three white and three black condemned murderers in five of those states were arguing last week that the new "mandatory" laws operated in the same unconstitutionally "capricious" way that earlier laws had. Stanford Law Professor Anthony Amsterdam, who has led the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund's long war against executions, contended that even if the new laws require neutral enforcement of the death penalty there is inevitably "play" in the system. Prosecutors, for example, can always decide against bringing a capital charge and juries can convict for a lesser offense. This "elaborate winnowing process," said Amsterdam...
There is support for Amsterdam's view in the working experience of other mandatory sentencing laws. In 1970, first-degree murder in Pennsylvania carried a mandatory punishment of life imprisonment, but a team of researchers, led by University of Chicago Law Professor Franklin Zimring, reports in a forthcoming study that plea bargaining and lesser charges were regularly used to evade the law's intent, suggesting to the authors "that legislation prescribing mandatory capital punishment for premeditated or felony-murder would not be mandatory in effect." Supporters of mandatory executions answer that the new capital punishment laws...
Prince Bernhard, the globetrotting royal businessman accused of being on the take in the Lockheed scandal (TIME, Feb. 23), was charged last week with doing some palm greasing of his own. The Netherlands' leading newspaper, Amsterdam's Telegraaf, implicated Bernhard in a $12 million bribe paid 25 years ago to the late dictator Juan Peron and other Argentine officials to clinch a $100 million railroad-car contract for the Dutch firm Werkspoor. The bribe, which was authorized by the Dutch State Bank and approved by the government, also included the gift of a deluxe presidential train...
...cynical about lots of things, but not about the monarchy," said a student in Amsterdam. The vast majority of the Dutch press and public last week embraced the Prime Minister's advice to consider Prince Bernhard innocent until proved guilty. That generosity of judgment was partly self-interested: the toppling of national idols is always painful, and the Dutch understandably prefer their princes upright. Their open-mindedness was also a gesture of gratitude to the German-born prince, who in cool and timeless service to The Netherlands had transformed his adopted countrymen's initial wariness about his origins...
Wagner: Overture to Die Meistersinger, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, Prelude to Parsifal, Preludes to Act I and Act III of Lohengrin (Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, conductor; Philips; $7.98). If records like this did not come along occasionally, one would tend to take these familiar excerpts for granted-as Herbert von Karajan obviously does in a bleary competing version on Angel. The freshness and vigor of Haitink's interpretations stem, surprisingly enough, from his scrupulously orthodox approach. He is less interested in conveying his own message than in getting his men-all of whom seem...