Word: leipold
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...shake-up of the German beer industry in the 1980s that inspired Bionade's inventor, Dieter Leipold, then master brewer at Ostheim's Privatbrauerei Peter, to quest for a new quaff. With younger German consumers increasingly choosing imports like Corona and Miller Lite over local beers, Leipold worried about the brewery's future. And there was more at stake than just business: it was family. He lived with the brewery's present owner, Sigrid Peter, now his wife, and acted as stepfather to her sons, Peter and Stephan Kowalsky...
...thing about conventional wisdom, though, is that it's not always right. And in this case, according to a new study by professor Andrew Leipold at the University of Illinois College of Law, it's dead wrong, at least in federal criminal trials. Though Grasso's case is a civil action in state court, the study's findings are so dramatic that they make you wonder why he or any other defendant would let a jury near a case...
...Leipold looked at the records in more than 75,000 federal criminal trials from 1989 through 2002. In about three-quarters of the cases, defendants chose to have a jury rather than a judge decide the outcome, as is their right under the Constitution. This was generally not a smart move. Judges convicted about 55 percent of the time, while the jury conviction rate was a whopping 84 percent...
...results surprised almost all the lawyers - defense attorneys as well as prosecutors - Leipold interviewed for the study. The defense folks said they preferred juries because judges feel too much pressure to convict, are wise to defense tricks, or hear a lot of negative information about the defendant before trial. Prosecutors admitted that they had believed that juries probably gave the accused a better chance at acquittal...
...could the supposed experts be so wrong? Leipold isn't sure, though he meticulously explored a variety of possibilities. A promising one is that since neither side wants to spend a lot of time and money on the many cases involving misdemeanors, or minor crimes, defense lawyers typically request a quick trial before a judge, prosecutors don't bother to prepare thoroughly, and the result is often acquittal. Another possibility is that judges so resented the federal sentencing guidelines, which replaced judicial discretion with strict and frequently harsh rules, that they demanded stronger proof of guilt when the prescribed sentence...