Word: hinckleys
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After torturous deliberations, a jury acquits John Hinckley...
...John Hinckley Jr., who had fired a revolver full of explosive bullets at President Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Movie Actress Jodie Foster, had been acquitted of attempted assassination. The young drifter who shot his way onto history's center stage stood silently at the defense table, closed his vacuous eyes, and tilted back his head...
...JoAnn Hinckley, the defendant's mother, covered her face. She sobbed, embraced her husband and then, though she tried not to, she smiled. So did her husband, the Colorado oil millionaire who last year kicked their boy out of the house and this month wept as he testified: "I wish to God I could trade places with him right now." But the dull blue eyes of their wayward son, pasted like wafers on his expressionless face, avoided the gaze of those in the courtroom through the very end. What emotions swirled in his twisted psyche-a mystery that neither...
...everyone involved but the phlegmatic Hinckley, the trauma of deciding his fate-a process that cost as much as $2.5 million*-was a wrenching ordeal. In the end, the awesome responsibility of sorting out the conflicting testimony and bewildering law fell on five men and seven women. A janitor, a cafeteria worker, a garage attendant, all but one black, they were not a jury of Hinckley's peers except in the legal sense. For 24 hours spread over four days they vacillated until, almost as an act of despair, they reached a decision that left them uneasy and bitter...
...second observation is that any forced analogies the Right will make-like that of Hinckley to Haldeman-are preposterous. Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon offended us because Nixon evaded liability for his action by using his contacts within government, when a friendless outsider, a loser like Hinckley, is let off there is, at least, no collusion to abhor. Whether the jury last week correctly deemed Hinckley insane will always be a judgement call. But the fact that he could win his reprieve from a system whose participants were predisposed against him seems worth applauding for a moment...