Word: murder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...COVENANT WITH DEATH, by Stephen Becker. A flavorful tale of a Mexican border state in the '20s, and the legal issue of whether a man, about to hang for a murder he did not commit, should be punished for killing the hangman...
Autumn's strongest scenes turn on the senseless murder of a Cheyenne by transient cowpokes, and the tribe's ritual slaying of a brave (Sal Mineo) who has taken another man's wife. Here and in the stoic, timeless beauty of Squaw Dolores Del Rio are intimations of the tragedy that might have been. Most of the time, though, Ford scatters his beleaguered redskins listlessly across a 70-mm. Super Panavision landscape, showing twice the width but little of the scope that distinguished such Ford classics as Stagecoach. Perhaps he feels alien to Indians...
...convicted murderer was dragged to the gibbet and eyes dipped for the last benediction. The sentenced man also lowered his head-and then suddenly drove it into the hangman's belly, sending him hurtling off the scaffold to his death on the cobblestones below During the 24 hours set aside for a second executioner to get to Soledad City near the Mexican border, new evidence surfaced, exonerating the "murderer" of his original charge. But what about the murder he now had committed...
Soledad City was part Old Mexico, part American frontier. Its ethic had elements of both-plus, at that time in the 1920s, the "shrill, maniacal lynch law" of the smugly righteous ladies in their long, black, chin-high dresses. These conflicts are embodied in the judge of the second murder trial, Benjamin Morales Lewis, 29. As he announces in his decision, "We have no precedents. We have only our own precarious humanity," no one's humanity seems more precarious than Ben Lewis'. The son of the town's Mexican grande dame and of its late county sheriff...
...days when defense lawyers spouted Scripture and wept real tears, Americans had the time of their lives at public trials. "People came for miles to hear those closing arguments," recalls a nostalgic Georgia judge. "It was almost like a Shakespearean festival." Today, sensational murder trials still draw S.R.O. audiences. But at a time when everyone frets over rising crime, hardly anyone attends the normal felony trial, to say nothing of misdemeanors. From where he sits in Texas, a state that once loved litigation even more than football, San Antonio's Criminal Court Judge Archie Brown flatly says: "The empty...