Word: deathly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...usual, both stories had been largely ignored by the daily Texas press. So was the Observer's inside account of the editorial revolt and shake-up at the Austin American-Statesman, where pinchpenny management refused to replate for another edition on the night of Robert Kennedy's death...
BRIEF AGAINST DEATH by Edgar Smith, with an introduction by William F. Buckley Jr. 364 pages. Knopf...
...March 5, 1957, the body of 15-year-old Schoolgirl Victoria Zielinski, her brains splattered about, was found along the bank of a sandpit in Mahwah, NJ. Within three months, Edgar Smith, 23, a knockabout machinist, was charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death for her murder. Eleven years later, challenging the death-house limbo record set by Caryl Chessman, Edgar Smith is still alive, fighting-and writing-for his life...
Brief Against Death is a detailed did-I-do-it? Smith's conviction was based on a tight chain of circumstantial evidence. By his own admission, he was with the murdered girl shortly before her death. He also concedes that he slapped her, but from that point on his story differs from that of the prosecution. Smith claims that he left the girl alive. According to the prosecution, he tried to rape her, and then he beat her to death...
Smith characterizes his trial as a hurry-up affair, marred by an inept defense and an inexperienced judge in a lynchlike atmosphere. Crucial facts, such as fixing the time of death, were botched by his attorney. The case against him, Smith suggests, was founded on shoddy police investigatory work and was somewhat in the nature of a frameup. The actual bases of his many appeals for a rehearing and retrial, which have kept him alive these many years, involve improper trial procedures and the applicability of the Supreme Court rulings regarding forced confession and post-indictment police interrogations...