Word: columbus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CROWN OF COLUMBUS...
...guess where these two polar-opposite paragons teach. You got it: Dartmouth, veddy Ivy League but founded as a prep school for New Hampshire Indian lads. Their common link, besides furtive lust, is Christopher Columbus. She has been asked for an article on the quincentennial of his first voyage from her people's perspective. He is laptopping an epic poem on the great explorer. In pursuit of Columbus' lost diary, Roger and Vivian fly to Eleuthera in the Bahamas as guests of a junk-bond financier on the lam. This quasi Milken thinks Vivian knows the secret burial site...
Nowhere is that point illustrated more starkly than in Columbus, Ga. Since Georgia adopted its current death-penalty law in 1973, four white men in the Columbus district attorney's office have decided which murders will be prosecuted as capital crimes. To date, 78% of their cases have involved white victims, although blacks are the victims in 65% of the community's homicides. Among the other factors that may create greater sympathy for a white victim or defendant: all four judges in the state superior court, which tries capital cases, are white, and often the juries are all white, although...
Given the odds stacked against black defendants who kill whites, the results are perhaps predictable. Last February two men were convicted of murder in separate trials in Columbus. James Robert Caldwell, a white defendant, was found guilty of raping and murdering his 12-year-old daughter and repeatedly stabbing his 10-year-old son. His sentence: life imprisonment. Jerry Walker, a black, was convicted of murdering the 22-year-old son of a white Army commander at nearby Fort Benning during a convenience-store robbery. His sentence: death. Caldwell's trial lasted five weeks. Walker's lasted 12 days...
...Columbus is not alone in its skewed application of justice. A 1990 report prepared by the government's General Accounting Office found "a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and imposition of the death penalty." A midterm assessment of the Bush Administration's civil rights track record issued last week by the independent Citizens Commission on Civil Rights found a similar "pattern of inequity" in death sentencing. Richard Burr of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's capital-punishment project puts it more bluntly, "Prosecutors frequently pay no attention to the families of black homicide...