Word: murder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lawmen plunged into the woods after the gunman. Moments later they brought out Aubrey James Norvell, 40, a pipe-smoking, unemployed hardware salesman from Memphis. Ultimately, Norvell, with no known involvement in racial issues, was charged with assault with intent to commit murder...
...Bond Honored, British Playwright John Osborne's tumid adaptation of an atrocious horror show by 17th century Spaniard Lope de Vega, has a hero who commits rape, murder, treason, multiple incest and matricide, and blinds his father-after which he is crucified in precise imitation of Christ. London's critics cast one look at the tasteless mayhem at the Old Vic and held their noses. Whereupon Osborne, 36, flipped his Angry Aging Man's lid, firing off telegrams to the London papers. Osborne declared an end to his "gentleman's agreement to ignore puny theater critics...
...weird substances, including massive doses of desiccated ox bile and extract of beef eye. Four months later, Linda was dead of cancer. When Dr. Phillips submitted a bill for $739, the Eppings charged him with grand theft by false pretenses. Appalled at what he viewed as the first recorded "murder by words," the prosecutor switched the grand-theft charge to murder on the ground that Phillips caused a death while committing a felony (defrauding the Eppings). After a three-week trial, the jury convicted the doctor of second-degree murder...
With painstaking loyalty to the law, the California Supreme Court has just reversed the doctor's conviction, "solely on the ground that the trial court erred in giving a felony-murder instruction." While the record may have contained sufficient evidence to support a conviction of second-degree murder, the court was unable to tell whether the jury had actually found that Phillips acted "in conscious disregard for life," a necessary element of the crime. Reason: the prosecutor's felony-murder theory...
Applying that theory, the trial judge instructed the jury that a person who commits a felony is automatically liable for any death occurring in the course of that felony. So far, so good. But in California, the felony-murder rule applies only to felonies that are themselves "inherently dangerous to life." And grand theft, the felony charged against Dr. Phillips, is no such inherently dangerous crime. As a result, the high court was duty bound to reverse the conviction...