Word: coronas
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Before Labor Contractor Juan Corona was convicted in 1973 for one of the greatest mass murders in memory-hacking and bludgeoning to death 25 itinerant farm workers around the sun-baked orchards of Yuba City. Calif.-his lawyer tried a stunning tactic. Defense Attorney Richard Hawk. 45. offered hardly any defense at all. Though he questioned a few of the 116 witnesses summoned by the prosecution, he called none himself and his summation lasted a bare seven minutes. In spite of that, the jury's first vote was 7 to 5 for acquittal, and it took a total...
Last week, nearly 5½ years after that verdict, a California court of appeal reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. The court seemed to have little doubt about Corona's guilt. It noted an "elaborately woven web of circumstantial evidence connecting appellant to the crimes and unerringly pointing to his participation in their commission." Even so, said the three-judge panel, the fact remains that Corona had a history of mental illness; yet his lawyer "failed to raise the obvious alternative defenses of mental incompetence and/or diminished capacity and/or legal insanity." Why? Because, said Hawk, discussing Corona...
What seemed to upset the appellate court most, however, was the fact that Corona, unable to pay the heavy legal fees for a case of such magnitude, granted Hawk exclusive literary and dramatic property rights to his life story in return for the lawyer's services. Even before the trial began. Hawk had hired a professional writer and negotiated a contract with Macmillan for a book about the case. This created a conflict of interest, said the court, that resulted in "an outrageous abrogation" of Corona's rights and "rendered the trial a farce and mockery...
...Bert Corona, former director of CASA, a Los Angeles-based group which lobbies for progressive immigration legislation, will speak at 7:30 followed by Timothy Whalen, acting district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who will present Carter's plan for dealing with the immigration problem. Jose Medina, former director of the Centro de Immigration at Georgetown University Law School, will respond to the Carter plan...
...author for 18 years, I shudder at your revelations about poor rates paid to freelance writers [April 10]. But you omitted the other side. Does every person with the price of a Smith-Corona deserve to be called freelance? The sobering answer: most editors' greatest complaint is that many "writers" don't bother to read a copy of the magazine before submitting articles and wildly miss the publication's slant. So-called freelancers fail to deliver assignments more than 50% of the time and have an awesome record of not meeting deadlines...