Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trial of four armed-robbery suspects was under way inside the columned, gray stone courthouse in the city of Nantes. Suddenly the measured pace of the legal proceedings was shattered as a man burst into the courtroom firing shots into the air and brandishing a hand grenade. Judge, jury, lawyers and a roomful of spectators dove for cover under tables and desks. The intruder, later identified as Abdelkarim Khalki, 33, quickly stripped five court officers of their .357 Magnum pistols and turned them over to two of the defendants. The 34 people in the courtroom had become prisoners...
Anticipation crackled in the air as nearly 500 human rights activists, journalists and other spectators crowded into a Victorian-style courtroom in downtown Buenos Aires. For eight months the chamber had resounded with the chilling testimony of 833 witnesses as they recounted tales of murder, torture and abductions in the night committed against suspected subversives during six years of military rule from 1976 to 1982. But a heavy silence fell over the room as six appeals-court judges filed in last week to deliver their verdict on the nine military leaders who had been charged with responsibility for what Argentines...
...others, Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, angrily donned a white kerchief embroidered with the human rights group's mournful motto, MAY THE DISAPPEARED APPEAR ALIVE. When De Bonafini refused to remove the offending garment, the judge ordered her to leave the courtroom. "I had no other way of protesting but to put on my kerchief when I heard that the killers were absolved," she told reporters. Later that evening, hundreds of other protesters marched through the city streets chanting "To the murderers, prison...
...loyal friend ("Man, I spent my life helping people, friends and enemies") and an absent-minded administrator ("I'm not a detail person"). Playing to the jury with the verve of a fiddler at a fais- dodo, the son of a Cajun sharecropper provoked chuckles from his courtroom claque, exasperation from the judge and testy objections from the federal prosecutor. Whether or not the jury finds his protestations persuasive when they begin deliberating later this week, Edwards' performance made fine theater in a state where politics is prized as a form of entertainment and where food, festivals and elected officials...
...jolting news capped an especially dramatic week in Philippine politics. At 8:30 a.m. on Monday, 150 people crammed into a Manila courtroom to hear a clerk and two interpreters read the verdict in the trial of 26 men charged with conspiracy in the assassination of Ninoy Aquino as he stepped off a plane at the Manila international airport on Aug. 21, 1983. The opinion of the three-judge court ran to 90 pages and took more than two hours to recite, but the verdict boiled down to two words: not guilty. "Thank God, it's all over," said...