Word: convict
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...neophyte actor took a couple of Richard Pryor hand-me-down roles and parlayed them into movie stardom. In 48 HRS., released last Christmas, Murphy played a sassy convict sprung from stir for two days to help Tough Cop Nick Nolte catch a couple of killers. The film's director, Walter Hill, says of Eddie: "This kid is so enormously talented he can get away with anything." This time Eddie ran away with the movie: 48 HRS., for which he was paid $200,000, has tallied an imposing $78 million at the box office...
...aerobics ("Good golly, Miss Molly, you look like a hog!"). The next he is Velvet Jones, a pomaded pimp, with teeth like sheathed knives, huckstering his how-to books for young ladies, I Wanna Be a Ho and Exercises of Love. Now he is Tyrone Green, an illiterate convict lionized by radical chic for his vengeful poetry ("Cill My Lanlord") and moving with the mean swagger of a ghetto goon pulling off his toughest scam. A few commercials later, he is Tyrone's spiritual cousin, Film Critic Raheem Abdul Muhammad, fashioning a variation on local-news patter-"Angry Talk...
...thieves' professionalism and the use of guns are explained partly by the change at the top of Britain's crime hierarchy. "In the past three years a completely new way of thinking has entered the criminal fraternity's activities," explains a former convict. "The fellows who are involved in these armed robberies are not basically criminal-they have not graduated through the various criminal classes as the usual criminal has. They have not knocked off a corner grocery store and then held up vans and so on working up to the big jobs. What we are seeing...
...similar case of an unsuccessful electrocution attempt in Louisiana in 1946, the convict was returned to the chair the next year and died. It this case and the Evans case demonstrate the only two options in case of an unsuccessful execution attempt, then perhaps one could say that continuing with the execution, rather than forcing an extended delay, might be the more merciful option--if such a scale of relativity exists...
...PROBLEM WITH MACHINERY does not mitigate a crime, but it does change the responsibility of society toward the convict. Prolonging the execution, as was done to Evans, smacks of torture. Forcing him to endure another attempt, on the other hand, is torture of a different sort, one difficult to measure, for it concerns mental and not physical pain...