Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: "We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second." Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators...
...protests that the inquiry into Philadelphia-area wrongdoing may be sabotaged by his ouster, the whole brouhaha almost certainly guarantees forceful pursuit of the probe to its end. That assignment will be carried out by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alan Lieberman, who did most of Marston's actual courtroom work, and hard-driving FBI Agent Neil Welch, who is rated the most effective bureau field commander in the country...
Reluctant witnesses, who tend to disappear, thus scuttling the prosecution's case, are cajoled into court. Several prosecutors have allowed defense attorneys to look through all police evidence against the suspect in an "open file" policy, to prevent long courtroom delays for "discovery." Says Washington Attorney Charles Work, who started the program in 1975 when he was with LEAA: "These cases get the same attention they'd receive in a small town. It's not a concentration of resources against an individual. It's a simple effort to keep the important cases from falling apart...
...what the great American sport is, and he will probably give one of three answers: football, baseball or basketball. In each case he would be wrong. The true national sport is the law, and the contest Americans love best is the one in the courtroom, where lives are at stake and vast sums can be won or lost on a lawyer's forward motion...
...Howard Cosell of the legal game is Louis Nizer, 75, a distinguished New York lawyer whose reportage can make the driest case read like The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Two previous books based on his own courtroom experiences, My Life in Court and The Jury Returns, were longtime bestsellers. Nizer represented Journalist Quentin Reynolds in a successful libel suit against Columnist Westbrook Pegler, and the account was exciting enough to be made into a Broadway play and a TV drama. The present volume suffers greatly by comparison. Part autobiography, part a philosophical guide to the law, it is mostly leftovers...