Word: leniently
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...long as our courts continue to be lenient, we must accept the 21,000 murders committed each year in this country. Murder has become as American as football and apple pie. The serial killers are surely guilty, but so are the parole boards that release these men into society to strike again...
...nightmarishly brutal: a six-hour gang rape in an Anderson, S.C., motel room by three men, after which the 80-lb. woman victim required four pints of blood and five days of hospitalization. The rapists had pleaded guilty in the hope that as first offenders, they would receive a lenient sentence from Judge C. Victor Pyle. "The defendants," intoned Pyle, "shall be confined to the custody of the South Carolina department of corrections for a period of 30 years." That was the maximum. The real jolt came when the judge added that he would suspend the sentence "upon the defendants...
Ironically, the government almost invited such license as it became more and more lenient. Earlier this year, for example, it tolerated a flowering of experimental and unorthodox dramas. Playwright Gao Xingjian's Bus Stop presented a story about eight people awaiting a bus that never arrives. Conspicuously absent were all the trappings of conventional Chinese drama: plot, moral and exhortation. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens were flocking to a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Miller himself at Peking's prestigious Capital Theater. The spectators sympathized so warmly with Bourgeois Protagonist Willy Loman...
...Daniel James White, 37, the former city supervisor who murdered Moscone and Milk. During White's controversial 1979 trial, his attorney pursued the so-called Twinkies defense, arguing that White committed his crimes in a "diminished mental capacity" caused in part by eating too much junk food. A lenient jury bought the line and produced a verdict of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. Under California's determinant sentencing law, that judgment carried a maximum term of seven years and eight months. With time off for good behavior, that makes White eligible for parole from Soledad prison beginning next...
Last month Illinois Criminal Judge Christy Berkos gave a lenient sentence to notorious Plumber-Rapist Brad Lieberman, who, on top of prior rape convictions, pleaded guilty to five rape charges. In an interview, the judge explained his sentence: "Lieberman had done things that did hurt the women, but fortunately he did not hurt the women physically by breaking their heads or other things we see. He didn't cut their breasts off, for instance...