Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...state where four-fifths of the population favors capital punishment, the main charge against Bird is that during her nine-year tenure the court has reversed all but three of the 55 death-penalty sentences that have come before it. Bird voted to overturn all of them. "She has been twisting the law so that it more closely reflects her own political beliefs," says Kern County District Attorney Edward Jagels, who, like many prosecutors, is an active Bird critic. (Bird refuses to divulge her personal position on capital punishment.) The campaign against the chief is a major factor...
...emotional buttons," she complains. Two other liberal supreme court justices, Joseph Grodin and Cruz Reynoso, are also under conservative pressure this year, although polls show that both of them are faring better than the chief is. Bird's backers charge that many of her opponents are merely using the death-penalty issue as a red herring to achieve a new majority on the seven-judge court, one that would be more sympathetic to business interests in civil cases. The Bird majority has supported tenants and favored the consumer in productliability suits...
...allegation that the court is soft on crime, her backers claim it has sided with the prosecution 90% of the time. Then why has no execution yet taken place in California during her tenure? Bird blames the fuzzy language of the state's 1978 death-penalty initiative and argues that the California Supreme Court has been getting the wrinkles out of the law. Executions will be upheld more easily, she predicts, when trial courts begin applying the justices' guidelines in new cases. "The death penalty is alive and well in California," Bird insists...
...death toll from Hurrican Gilbert was expected to rise...
...complete ban on shows, citing a list of 13 accidents in Europe during the past six years that have taken the lives of more than 110 people, most of them civilians. A bare 25 minutes before the Ramstein accident, horrified spectators watched a Finnish pilot dive to his death at an air show near Hasselt, Belgium...