Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Newsmen charged that to throw them off the trail prison officials sent a closed van through the prison gate as a decoy. Then, under cover of darkness, they slipped May out. Not until a convict inside the prison blew his breath on the ice-cold windowpane and wrote with his finger GONE, did the reporters waiting outside know that May had been released and they had missed him. Said a terse prison announcement later that morning: "[We] can inform you gentlemen that May has been discharged. That...
...Manchester Guardian, May's insistence on privacy and the Home Office's determined cooperation with him seemed reasonable enough. In Britain, where a convict's full citizenship rights are automatically restored as soon as he is released from prison, there is a long tradition of forgiving & forgetting no matter how serious the crime. Said a Guardian editorial: "There is a decent British tradition that a man's past is not to be raked up lightly, and that a convict, having purged his offense, is entitled to ... a new start in life." But other papers were indignant...
...There are several misconceptions about the testimonial privilege to remain silent. The witness is not the ultimate judge of the tendency of an answer to the question will tend, rightly or wrongly, to convict him of a crime...
...found a witness who corroborated Rogers' story that he had arrived in Peters burg by train, thus could not have stolen the car in North Carolina. At that evi dence, Rogers' sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Then a fellow convict told Rogers of Argosy magazine's "Court of Last Resort," an investigative agency started by Argosy Publisher Henry Stee-ger and Whodunit Writer Erie Stanley (Perry Mason) Gardner (TIME, May 9, 1949). Rogers wrote to Argosy and Ar gosy went to work on the case...
...when the last convict ship reached New South Wales, the colony had received 83,290 prisoners. Each convict had to work out his stretch at something close to slave labor, either on a private farm or on state works. Brutality drove many to escape and outlawry, so the old petty larcenist became the new bushranger-a combination of rustler and highwayman. In the public mind, he also lost his criminal record and became one who "robbed the rich and helped the poor, and never harmed a lady...