Word: golston
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That was the question Superior Court Chief Justice Walter H. McLaughlin and a Boston jury faced late last month as testimony unfolded in the trial of Siegfried Golston, an 18-year-old black charged with Salem's murder. Their conclusion may set a far-reaching precedent. For the first time in a criminal case, a jury explicitly stated it had defined death as the cessation of brain activity, a major departure from the traditional definition of death as the absence of breathing and heartbeat that has been in effect in Massachusetts and most other states...
...issue arose because for seven days following the attack, Salem's heartbeat and breathing had been sustained by life-support machines; when they were withdrawn, all life signs ended. So the question was whether Salem had been killed by Golston with the baseball bat or had died when all hospital maintenance of his body systems ceased...
...course of the case directly and moving intentionally into unexplored legal territory, Judge McLaughlin told the jury that it could construe brain death as legal death. Thus instructed, it took the jury only an hour to decide that Salem was dead by the second day after the attack and Golston was guilty of first-degree murder...