Word: murderer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Irrevy:" An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power may conclude that the nuclear industry is killing people on a scale the Son of Sam could only dream of. Author John W. Gofman asserts that everyone in the industry shares responsibility for the peculiar modern crime of "premeditated random murder." Gofman chairs the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, which has published his collection of talk given at anti-nuclear rallies and in a debate with Edward Teller, famous for his H-bomb paternity...
Perhaps most controversially, Gofman advocates "bringing home the Nuremberg Principles." Death spread by nuclear power strikes him as murder of a civilian population, fitting the Nuremberg definition of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg statement that "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not abstract entities" would therefore open legions of scientists, bureaucrats and others to prosecution. The more practical converse of his view is that citizens who withhold taxes, trespass on reactor sites or otherwise resist nuclear power are entitled to present juries with the reasons for their civil disobedience--a line of defense judges disallow...
Since the publication of his book, Gofman has brought his concept of nuclear "murder" to the trial of protestors who scaled a fence at the Rancho Seco plant in California. Swayed by Gofman's testimony, the jury acquitted one defendant on the grounds that he had reason to believe his crime was necessary to prevent a substantial and immediate danger to life and property...
...Bertrand Tavernier's new film, The Judge and The Assassin, unwittingly reveals just how impossible this feat of emotional empathy is. The horror of the crime repells us; we are haunted by the image of our own face screaming in the last minutes of life. A Theodore Bundy-style murder dehumanizes the victim, turning a person into an object. Horrified yet fascinated, we devour the newspaper clippings; each gruesome detail imprints itself on our memory. We become transfixed by the terrifyingly personal nature of random death--the element of chance strips us of all defenses. As a result, any film...
Leon Esterling, Edward J. Soares, and Richard S. Allen were convicted of first degree murder on March 24, 1977. Their convictions were reversed when the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled March 9, 1979 that the prosecution had violated the constitutional rights of the three black men by rejecting 12 of the 13 prospective black jurors...