Word: lenient
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...District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell is known as a tough sentencer, but he turned surprisingly lenient last week. Though Gesell could have sent former Lieut. Colonel Oliver North to prison for ten years for his role in the Iran- contra affair, the judge declined to do so. Instead, after listening to North softly declare that he had grieved over his "mistakes," he handed North three suspended sentences, two years' probation, $150,000 in fines and 1,200 hours of community service in an antidrug program for inner-city youths. (The Navy promptly suspended North's $23,000-a-year pension...
...about the same time, the government issued harsh martial-law decrees ordering leaders of the prodemocracy movement, "important figures who incited and organized this counterrevolutionary insurrection in the capital," to turn themselves in for "lenient treatment." The decrees set up a spy-and-report network, complete with 18 telephone hot lines, so that citizens could help round up dissidents. Fearful of arrest, student leaders who had survived the carnage went underground or fled the city. The astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a leading dissident who was prevented by the government from dining with George Bush during the President's visit last February...
...Arrested for forging $800 worth of checks last year, Brenda Vaughan of Washington was given a drug test that revealed cocaine use. Since she was a first-time offender and a mother-to-be, a lenient prosecutor merely recommended probation. Instead, the judge sent Vaughan to jail for nearly four months in order to protect the fetus. The baby was born healthy...
That being so, Imelda told a Philippine newspaper, should her husband pass away she will have his body embalmed and put on display in Hawaii as a political statement and "an international spectacle." There it would remain until 1992, the next presidential-election year. Then, under a presumably more lenient regime, she would take his remains home, have them cremated and scatter his ashes over the Philippines, she says, "to fertilize his country...
Judges have traditionally enjoyed such leeway in meting out jail terms that one prisoner could serve many times as long as another for a similar crime. Concerned about unfair -- and often overly lenient -- sentences, Congress in 1984 created the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which issued a manual that greatly restricts judges' discretion in sentencing 40,000 federal defendants a year. The new system, for crimes committed since Nov. 1, 1987, also abolished parole and sharply limited probation and time off for good behavior...