Word: convict
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...campaign of intimidation. The brave efforts of a handful of Sicilian judges and prosecutors like Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, assassinated in a similar blast in May, had won only feeble support from Rome. Nonetheless, the courts managed to put more than 400 suspected mobsters on trial and convict the vast majority of them. But now the Mafia has challenged the prosecutors to back off, and its bloody taunt has thrust the country into a crisis of confidence, adding fear of civil disorder to serious economic troubles. Commented the Corriere della Sera: "We have chosen leaders who are very capable...
Cambridge's Most Wanted: A couple rents a car and sneaks away for the weekend without informing either set of parents. They get rear-ended in Vermont by a drunk escaped convict and have to call their folks from a police station...
...MAYBE NOT. I cannot imagine that I would have voted to acquit the officers who beat Rodney King to a pulp. Like everyone else, I saw the famous videotape played on the news countless times. And I expected the jury to convict--even if it was an all non-Black jury drawn from an adjoining county that's a world apart from downtown L.A. I was shocked by the acquittal...
...guaranteeing that a jury excluding blacks would be chosen (Simi Valley is not only almost exclusively white but also has a relatively large population of policemen and other civil servants) and that such a group of jurors was desired specifically because it would be almost certain not to convict. Not a few white observers, including some legal scholars, are inclined to agree with that judgment, at least partly. Says Douglas Colbert, a professor of criminal law at Hofstra: "I don't believe it would have mattered what evidence was presented or not presented." But again, white sympathy does little...
...jury was "not the end." He ordered federal authorities to speed an investigation with a view toward starting a federal prosecution of the four cops for violating King's civil rights, utilizing a law enacted specifically to apply in cases where state courts and juries could or would not convict. That move might help convince skeptical blacks that they can after all get fair treatment from the judicial system. Better late than never -- but it remains to be seen whether the racial chasm that the King case and the riots revealed and widened can be bridged...