Word: lai
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...came to symbolize much that went wrong with the long and searing U.S. involvement in Viet Nam was set free last week. Former Army Lieutenant William L. Calley, accused of murdering at least 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968, was released in a complex interplay of military and civil justice. He had served 40 months of his ten-year sentence, 35 months of it rather comfortably confined to his own living quarters...
...participated as a defense attorney in two of the four cases you mentioned (Dr. Sam Sheppard and My Lai Four-Captain Ernest Medina), I have vivid memories of the dynamics of those trials and the publicity difficulties that had to be overcome...
...heart of this classic tension between two democratic principles is the question of whether jurors are capable of rendering a conscientious and just verdict even in cases they may have read about widely before they entered the courtroom. Recently, the legal fallout from two extraordinary events, the My Lai massacre and Watergate, has raised -and confused-the issue once again...
...other event that reopened the fair-trial, free-press issue came last month, when Federal District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott reversed the conviction of William Galley and ordered him released from confinement in the My Lai case. Elliott's foremost argument was that "massive adverse pretrial publicity" had prevented the six-officer panel at Galley's court-martial in 1971 from considering the case without prejudice and that, therefore, he had not been fairly tried...
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law. Watergate and My Lai are two of the hardest cases in recent American history, for each is freighted with immense emotional and symbolic meaning. Each involves trial of subordinates while the crime may lie higher up the chain of command. The My Lai massacre became a paradigm of everything that went wrong with the American venture in Viet Nam. Enemies of U.S. policy seized upon the event to dramatize their case. The Army, anxious to protect its name, sought to isolate the tragedy and its participants as untypical of military performance...