Word: girard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Girard Case...
America has need of friends abroad, but the brutal shooting of a poverty-stricken, scrap-picking Japanese woman by Private William Girard has made enemies instead. Insult has been added to injury now that Girard has become the recipient of that modern legal farce, the suspended sentence. Girard not only has got away with murder, but he has cost Uncle Sam precious good will...
Accused of killing Naka Sakai on a hilltop after luring her onto a rifle range with promises of spent brass cartridges (TIME, June 17), Army Specialist Third Class William S. Girard entered a Japanese courtroom one day last week to hear the verdict of his celebrated 86-day trial. Girard, intoned Chief Judge Yuzo Kawachi, was guilty...
Judge Kawachi spared no one in his summing up. He chided the band of Japanese shell-pickers scavenging the U.S. firing range for precious brass, implied that the U.S. military authorities at the range were almost criminally negligent, and said that Girard himself, "immature in his thinking, [had given way] to a childish whim . . . satisfying a momentary caprice." The sentence: three years' hard labor suspended (no jail time), and payment of witnesses' expenses...
Judge Kawachi sought to establish motive. "Did you think Girard fired the shot at the woman in fun?" he asked Army Specialist Third Class Victor Nickel, who was with Girard when he fired. "Yes-for a joke," Nickel replied. Then the judge drew from a Japanese prosecution witness the testimony that Girard had at least shouted a warning ("Get outa here") to the woman before he fired, whereupon Girard weakened his own case and astonished the courtroom by denying it. "These discrepancies baffle me," said Judge Kawachi in a genial interim verdict at week...