Word: defectiveness
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...annulment, granted when the marriage contract can be proved in some way defective, and thus invalid from inception. Among grounds for annulment are impotence, refusal to have children, lunacy at time of marriage, coercion of one of the partners into wedlock, or some technical defect of the ceremony itself. French church tribunals, for instance, granted Napoleon an annulment from Josephine because the required two witnesses were not present at the marriage. Last year, the New York Archdiocese got 1,500 annulment petitions, of which it granted nearly half-mostly on the "technical defect" that the marriage was contracted before...
Then, in 1954, in the case of a Washington, D.C., housebreaker, Monte Durham, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals declared that a person is not criminally responsible if his "unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect." This was a great deal broader than M'Naghten, said Kaufman, but it created new problems. Deciding whether an act is the "product" of a disease is difficult, perhaps impossible. Moreover, such terms as "mental disease and mental defect" give expert psychiatric witnesses a blank check. "It seems clear that a test which permits all to stand...
...Code, he said, is adopted "as the standard in the courts of this circuit." The A.L.I, test, which may some day be known as Freeman, provides that: "A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law." However, "repeated criminal conduct" does not alone prove such abnormality...
...Harvard, 26-year-old Charles went dashing off to the Civil War, rose to the rank of brevet brigadier general. Since no other Adams had ever been a soldier, Charles Francis Sr., Lincoln's Minister to the Court of St. James's, concluded that there was a defect in his son's character. More over, on his return from the war, Charles did not immerse himself in cultural affairs, as his more renowned brother Henry did. Nor did he show the slightest interest in becoming President of the U.S., like his great-grandfather and grandfather. Instead...
...Cusack), recalling Leamas from West Berlin to London for an extraordinary mission: to frame Mundt, the Communist intelligence chief whose assassins have been eradicating Britain's East German informants. Leamas must act as a decoy, shamming to convince the East Germans that he is embittered and ripe to defect. While the gears of intrigue mesh, Burton's face projects more nakedly than the novel did that Leamas, believing in nothing, half believes in his own worthlessness...