Word: courtly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recently as 1972, it looked as if the death penalty would soon go the way of the lash and the rack. That year, in Furman vs. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, "in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." It had been applied "wantonly" and "freakishly"-most often against poor blacks. But four years later, the court approved new capital punishment laws designed by individual states to be less arbitrary. Typically, the laws allow juries to hand down...
Lawyers for John Spenkelink, a white drifter sentenced to death for murdering another white in a Florida motel room six years ago, tried this argument on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The court rejected it, and last month the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The Spenkelink decision is important. The Fifth Circuit covers the six Southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) that have 75% of all the prisoners now on death row. It means that Spenkelink has nearly exhausted all possible legal remedy, and scores of inmates in other Southern...
When the Stanford University Daily went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977 to challenge a surprise police raid of its newsroom, the Carter Administration supported the local police. A Justice Department brief argued that the First Amendment did not protect a newspaper from unannounced searches, even if the paper's reporters were not suspected of any wrongdoing. By a 5-to-3 vote, the high court agreed in a decision that outraged editors and publishers...
...what was going on. Colorado Governor Richard Lamm was furious. "The public is being treated like mushrooms-kept in the dark and spread with manure," he fumed. Two days later, the university's regents revealed that Colorado had acquired Fairbanks because of an extraordinary out-of-court settlement: the indefatigable Flatirons had agreed to pay $200,000 to the Patriots in return for dropping the suit...
...Minister and the Shah's closest adviser; before a firing squad; in Tehran. Hoveida presided over Iran's "White Revolution" of land reform and modernization in the mid-1960s but was arrested in November 1978 on the Shah's orders on suspicion of corruption. An Islamic court found him guilty of corruption, heroin smuggling, spying for the U.S., and "Zionism...