Word: mooneye
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...since the year of the Big Wind in Ireland has the world had anything quite so windy to read about as the things we have been reading about for the last week . . . in reference to the eternal Mooney case. . . . Everything that could bring the State and its administration of justice into disrepute has been done by the [San Francisco] press. [It] may congratulate itself upon having made a holy show of the State...
...Francisco newsmen have come to expect castigation from Editor Morphy for their antics. This time, however, they knew, and knew he must know, that the paper which had set the pace on the Mooney-Billings case was the San Francisco News. The News is a Scripps-Howard paper and Publisher Roy Howard went to San Francisco personally to supervise the building up of the Mooney-Billings story into a Sacco-Vanzetti Case of the West?a feature for the nation-wide Scripps-Howard chain. Observers outside of California also knew that leading papers not in the Scripps-Howard chain...
Throughout the ordeal, however, MacDonald stuck to the main outline of his recantation. He claimed that police Captain Charles Goff had forced his identification of Billings and Mooney in the city prison, that District Attorney Fickert had put "a whole pack of lies" into his head which he repeated to the trial juries. Said he: "Fickert told me if I would stand by the identification of Billings and Mooney I'd get the biggest slice of the reward." Asked Justice Preston mockingly: "You swore this at the time God was judging you to be a liar" MacDonald only wept...
Police Captain Goff testified that MacDonald had identified Billings and Mooney without any prompting from him. Another witness declared that he had heard MacDonald describe the bombing and the two men with the suitcase two hours after the explosion. The hearing unexpectedly broadened out when Miss Estelle Smith, onetime dental nurse, drug addict and witness against Billings at his trial, revised her testimony, charged that Prosecutor Fickert had pressed her into perjury. Incidentally she set up an alibi for Billings by declaring he was in her office, a mile from the explosion scene, just a few minutes before the bomb...
...Because Mooney is a first offender, California's Governor Clement Calhoun Young is empowered to pardon him without the Supreme Court's recommendation, on his own initiative. But because the facts in the two cases are so intertwined, Governor Young was being guided largely by the Supreme Court's hearing in the Billings case. Last week he summoned MacDonald to Sacramento to hear him repeat his recantation...