Word: murtagh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carey explained that his decision followed a "perceptible decline in public confidence" in Nadjari. He cited "clashes in personalities as well as a series of adverse court decisions and rulings" against the special prosecutor. Indeed, Nadjari had been bickering openly with State Supreme Court Justice John M. Murtagh over a number of key indictments that the judge had recently invalidated. But Carey's action came as a surprise because the dispute appeared to have been resolved...
Murray Kempton is sometimes bril liant in his perceptions of the angry prides and prejudices and the different worlds that met in Justice John Murtagh's New York City courtroom. But The Briar Patch is weirdly overwritten. Kempton's high prose style often so veneers the drama that even the simple facts of the case become difficult to follow. The language sometimes seems a travesty of James or Gibbon undertaking to describe Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Kempton simultaneously affects engagement and disdainful detachment, and the result occasionally leaves him drifting over the events in a kind of rhetorical...
...impact. From exile in Algiers, Black Panther Richard Moore wrote a piece accusing Panther Huey P. Newton of substituting slogans for action, castigating the Times as "the organ of the ruling class" and condemning the "Fascist Farce of a Trial Presided over by the evil likes of [Judge] John Murtagh," from whose court Moore had fled. As the Times clearly intended, its Op-Ed has provided an occasional beam of fresh light on familiar topics. Edward C. Banfield, a professor of government at Harvard, described "the lower class" as not necessarily poor, not necessarily black, but clearly distinguishable from...
Foreman James I. Fox, a black musician, spent 20 minutes answering the court clerk's 156 queries on each specification of the indictment. Judge Murtagh had dismissed all but twelve of the counts against each defendant when he sent the case to the jury. Still, he left the basic prosecution case intact. Afterward, Juror Stephen Chaberski, a graduate student at Columbia University, explained the vote: "The government just did not prove its case...
Ironically, Judge Murtagh, whom the defendants repeatedly denounced in the courtroom, apparently influenced the outcome in the Panthers' favor. Said Chaberski: "In his charge the judge made it perfectly clear about motive and intent. Motive, he explained, is what the defendants would like to do; intent is whether they really intended to do it. And the government did not prove intent." The stunningly swift verdict came after a single written ballot on each charge...