Word: fiok
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Creep. Idiot. Nut. Fool. Punk. Dirty s.o.b." For five weeks, three defendants hurled those epithets at Pittsburgh Judge Albert A. Fiok. At times, they threatened his life. Determined to avoid any conceivable grounds for reversal by a higher court, Fiok took it all for the sake of "a fair and impartial trial." Some trial. In frontier days, the defendants would have been hanged on the spot...
Charged with attempted escape from Western Penitentiary, Convicts Richard Mayberry, Dominic Codispodi and Herbert Langnes set out to goad Judge Fiok into declaring a mistrial. They demanded the right to defend themselves; and once they got it, they proceeded to act like crazy lawyers and harass Judge Fiok all the more...
...When Fiok refused to lose his cool during the trial's first three weeks, the cons armed themselves with homemade zip guns, broke out of the county jail during the weekend, kidnaped a policeman, and wounded a guard. Recaptured within an hour, they brazenly demanded a mistrial on the ground of "prejudicial publicity." When that failed, Mayberry scorned the trial as "comic opera," called the prosecutor "Gilbert" and the judge "Sullivan." "If I can't get my rights legally," Langnes shouted at the judge, "I'll have to blow your head off. You understand that, punk...
...Judge Fiok finally ended the testimony over the objections of "Lawyer" Mayberry, who refused to stop cross-examining one of his own witnesses. During the judge's charge to the jury, which, by law, defendants must hear, Fiok was forced to have the cater wauling trio gagged, put in straitjackets, and finally ejected to an anteroom to which his words were duly piped over a loudspeaker...
Remarkably, it took the jury nearly seven hours to find the cons guilty-whereupon Judge Fiok finally had his innings. After handing each defendant a sentence of up to 40 years, Fiok rattled off contempt citations that added up to a total of 37 years to be served in solitary confinement and at hard labor. Unhappily, the trio must now also be tried for their mid-trial escape-unless the state takes mercy on Pittsburgh judges and drops the charges...