Word: direly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...forgiven. After all, Charles de Gaulle, 76, was only 15 years old. Clearly born to the purple, the lad wrote the one-act play, entitled An Unfortunate Encounter, to win a boys' magazine prize for the best playlet in verse. His dream of glory involved the dire meeting of a traveler, a brigand and a gendarme in the forest. After le petit Charles won the prize, Encounter was printed in 50 copies, and now one of them is enshrined in the French National Library. The youthful masterpiece lay buried there, but last week a columnist for Le Figaro learned...
...Real Start. Voir dire is an art practiced largely in U.S. state courts. British judges simply call twelve veniremen at random without even asking their occupations. American federal judges usually do the questioning themselves. But in most state courts, lawyers are freely permitted to use voir dire not only to select jurors but to "condition" them. "Voir dire is really the start of a criminal trial," says F. Lee Bailey. "If you do it carelessly, you can lose a case by the time you get a jury together...
Reasonable Doubt. Rejection is only part of the process. Lawyers exploit voir dire as their only chance to make friends with individual jurors. They joke, flatter, hatch homilies and seek what Manhattan's Stanley Reiben calls "transference of identity." All the while, the defense attorney struggles to get across the law's presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As Houston's Walter F. Walsh points out: "Many jurors will not and cannot, within the confines of conscience, find a defendant not guilty just because there...
...attorney may accept them: some people yearn to prove themselves unprejudiced. Moreover, lawyers commonly ask jurors in advance to guarantee disregard for this or that messy fact ("Will you disregard the defendant's adultery?"). Not for nothing does Percy Foreman devote as much as ten days to voir dire. "Once we chose the jury in the Candy Mossier case (see following story)," he says, "I knew we were in. They had promised to consider only murder as the crime on trial...
Death Verdict? To greater or lesser extent, all of these factors weighed in the Speck voir dire. For his part, State's Attorney William Martin, 30, took a cool approach. "Where the crime speaks for itself," he said, "it is not for us to seek the sympathy of the jurors." Though he was searching for the relatives of policemen, nurses and young girls, Martin mainly focused on reactions to the most important question: "Do you have any conscientious or religious objections to the death penalty...