Word: conviction
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...Chaplinesque plot begins very slowly with an ex-convict deprived of employment and his passport. Desperate, the little man buys a Captain's uniform, storms into Koepenick, and seizes the Town Hall. Always jibing at stuffy authoritarian, the ersatz Captain imprisons even Mayor Obermculler, a stout buffoon played by Max Guelstorff. The mayor knows nothing of his offense, but there can be no injustice under Germany's martial law and order. He salutes and plods to jail...
...week." He finished his drink and sauntered out the door into the arms of a waiting plainclothesman. At the station, without even bothering to question him, the police sent him straight to Las Heras penitentiary where he was issued the grey pants, jacket and cap of an Argentine convict and thrown into a cell. Seventeen days later, he was suddenly freed...
...privilege to remain silent. The witness is not the ultimate judge of the tendency of an answer to incriminate him. He can be required, on pain of contempt punishment, to disclose enough to show a real possibility that an answer to the question will tend, rightly or wrongly, to convict him of a crime. Manifestly this is a delicate business. The witness must not be required to prove his guilt in demonstrating the incriminating character of the answer sought. A judge must decide when the witness has gone far enough to demonstrate his peril...
Mere embarrassment is not an excuse: the witness must be subjecting himself to some degree of danger of conviction of a criminal offense. There are refinements of this subject beyond the scope of this letter. For example, the immunity under the Fifth Amendment of a witness before a federal agency does not ordinarily extend to exoneration from compulsory self-incrimination of offenses under State law; but recently some lower federal courts have refused to find witnesses guilty of contempt of the "Kefauver committee" when they refused to answer questions tending to convict them of certain State crimes that committee...
...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...