Word: culprit
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...most fateful exercise of judicial discretion is the one that starts with the words "I sentence you . . ." Whether to slap the wrist or slam the cell door is a complex and partly subjective decision in which the particulars of the crime, the history of the culprit and the disposition of the judge all play a part. No wonder, then, that a stickup may draw anything from hard time to probation and defense lawyers maneuver to get their cases heard by judges known to go easy...
...know, justice at Harvard began with the so-called "Three Lies" scandal of 1638. Although details remain hazy, the affair appears to have involved some back-dated checks passed by an undergraduate posing as the school's founder. Modern historians do not know for sure how the culprit was formally tried, but presume that justice was meted according to the custom of the day: the accused met behind closed doors with his adviser, his house tutor, and five members of the faculty, and then was thrown down a well to see if he could float...
...after the culprit, little Dewitt Jr., was found hidden away with a cache of skin magazines, Dewitt felt it was time for a little parental firmness. Medieval torture seemed appropriate, but perhaps might affect the boy's development. Capital punishment was out for the same reason. Not that Dewitt is predisposed towards an antipathetic view of youth; rather, simply, that he hates kids...
...innocent of both crimes, the police freed him. How could they be so sure? By using the new technique of DNA fingerprinting, which involves analyzing nuclear rather than mitochondrial DNA, they had proved that while the same person had committed the murders, the man in custody was not the culprit. This month the police began using the test on blood samples from 2,000 Midlands men, hoping that if one of them is guilty, his DNA print will give him away...
...first clue is often the catastrophe itself: a fatal heart attack. But the events that set the stage for disaster, like those preceding an earthquake, have been occurring for years beneath the surface, painless and unnoticed. The culprit is silent ischemia, an intermittent interruption of blood flow to the heart, which kills tens of thousands of seemingly healthy Americans each year. Doctors estimate that the condition, undetected, exists in an additional 3 million to 4 million people known to have heart disease and further increases the likelihood they will suffer a heart attack...