Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...traces Ray's itinerant and difficult upbringing: eldest of nine children; father sometimes fixing and trading junk cars, hauling with a pickup truck, dishwashing, more frequently out of work, then abandoning the family; mother turning to alcohol; two brothers often in prison or reform school; one uncle a convict; life, with no privacy, in a farm shack near Ewing, Mo., and in a grandmother's house in Alton, Ill.; postwar service as an Army MP in Nurnberg, Germany; a discharge for a "lack of adaptability" to military service...
Some courts have tried to reduce the crowding, but without much success. In 1970, for example, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that conditions in a New Orleans prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the convict population cut from 1,200 to 450; it is still almost double that. Federal courts in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have acted similarly, with similar results. Convicts for whom there is no room in state prisons languish in overcrowded county jails. A group of county sheriffs in Georgia has threatened to go to federal court because the 700 prisonbound convicts in their...
...have the courts always acted consistently in other, related cases. Though euthanasia, or deliberate mercy killing, is still regarded as murder, the courts have generally dealt lightly with those accused of it. Juries in such cases have shown a reluctance to convict; even when they do, judges have usually been lenient in their sentencing. In a 1968 case in Illinois, for example, a 69-year-old man admitted to suffocating his crippled wife and then attempting to take his own life. The judge, on his own initiative, withdrew the man's guilty plea, entered a judgment of not guilty...
...metaphor for all suffering at the hands of men. Some women wear CASTRATE RAPISTS buttons. In Florida this year, feminists tracked and beat up a rape suspect who allegedly preyed on lonely women in singles bars. Some mutter darkly about assassinating rapists if the courts will not convict. Feminists made a national cause celebre out of the case of Joan Little, the black woman acquitted of murder in the stabbing of a jailer who she says attacked her sexually. When Inez Garcia, a Chicane woman in Soledad, Calif., shot a man to death 27 minutes after he allegedly held...
...point that is also supported by Judge Lawrence H. Cooke of the New York State court of appeals. Says Cooke: "The defense rarely ever waives a jury trial, knowing that the jury is an ally, not an enemy. Juries, which are often male-dominated, are extremely reluctant to convict." So are a surprising number of female jurors. Many middle-class women jurors prefer not to believe young, braless and freewheeling rape victims. In particular, the myth that victims somehow provoke and accept rape is still very much alive. "In our many years of work with the sexual offender," reports Psychologist...