Word: murders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...dealing with proposals to abolish or restrict capital punishment, the Labor government has looked like a comedian tangled up in flypaper. The House of Lords and the plain people (69% of them, according to an opinion poll) want hanging kept as the penalty for murder. A majority in the Laborite House of Commons wants it abolished...
...Lords rejected one House of Commons scheme abolishing the noose for five years (TIME, June 14). So, last fortnight, the House of Commons proposed a "compromise" amendment. It divided murder into two categories, the first punishable by hanging, the second by life imprisonment...
...instead of a simple distinction between premeditation and impulse, the amendment set up some more subtle definitions. It was first-degree murder if connected with robbery, burglary, rape, sex offenses, the death of a policeman or prison guard, the use of explosives. Repeated use of a slow poison, such as arsenic, would be a capital offense; but a single, lethal dose of prussic acid would be only second-degree murder...
After six hours, the head of the five-judge military tribunal gravely pronounced the stiffest sentence he could give under Italian law:* life imprisonment, including four years' solitary confinement, for "repeated and premeditated murder...
...choice items in Editor Linscott's basket is an account of how mid-19th Century Boston was rocked by scandal: the only known instance in which a Harvard professor committed murder. A Harvard janitor, one Littlefield, achieved immortality of a sort by nabbing the murderer, who had buried his victim in a vault under his chemistry laboratory. As he dug into the wall of the vault, related Littlefield, "the first thing I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg." With appropriate Harvard restraint, the janitor added: "I knew this was no place...