Word: murderousness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Billionaire Boys Club, a high-living confederation of some 30 youths from rich families in the Los Angeles area, Ronald Levin was a con man who bilked him in a phony investment scheme before disappearing in June 1984. To the authorities, Levin was the victim of a revenge murder that Hunt planned and carried out with such thoroughness that the body has never been found. Last week a Santa Monica Superior Court jury agreed with the prosecutors, convicting Hunt of robbery and murder...
Although defense witnesses maintained they had seen Levin alive in Arizona since his disappearance, the jurors were convinced by damaging testimony from Hunt's associates, as well as a seven-page recipe for murder in Hunt's hand. Titled "at Levin's TO DO," the gruesome job sheet listed tasks such as "tape mouth, handcuff, put gloves on, explain situation, kill dog." Hunt, 27, faces the death penalty or life imprisonment. Said he: "My only responsibility now is to keep my chin up. That's what I do best...
...during a 1978 robbery. Lawyers for McCleskey argued that race had played a part in his being sentenced to die in Georgia's electric chair -- the race of his victim as well as his own. The principal supporting evidence was a statistical study of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases from 1973 to 1979. Conducted by University of Iowa Law Professor David Baldus and two colleagues, the study found that those who killed whites were 4.3 times as likely to receive the death penalty as those who killed blacks. And blacks who killed whites were most likely...
...make matters worse for opponents of the death penalty, just one day before the McCleskey ruling the court significantly restricted an earlier decision that had blocked the execution of certain defendants convicted under "felony murder" laws. Those laws, on the books in most states, allow murder convictions against defendants who took part in a felony in which a killing occurred, even if they did not carry out the killing themselves. The new case involved Ricky Tison and his brother Raymond, who as teenagers in 1977 helped their father and his cell mate to escape from an Arizona prison. Soon after...
...majority that lined up in McCleskey, ruled that "major participation" in a felony "combined with reckless indifference to human life" is sufficient to justify a death penalty. For one thing, she noted, the Tison boys knew that their father was serving a life sentence for the murder of a prison guard during an earlier escape attempt. She sent back their case for an Arizona court to consider whether such reckless indifference had been a factor...