Word: pardoner
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...justices of the Supreme Court of California last week descended from their high judicial bench to hear John MacDonald recant testimony that had sent Thomas J. Mooney and Warren K. Billings, radical labor agitators, to prison for life. Sitting without robes, not as a court but as an advisory pardon board, the justices commenced what was virtually and peculiarly a retrial of the bombing of San Francisco's Preparedness Day parade in 1916. Billings, as a two-time felon, could be pardoned only with the Supreme Court's approval...
Witness MacDonald, wandering waiter, had been found in Baltimore and sent to California by the Mooney-Billings defense to admit his perjury after the Supreme Court refused last month to recommend a pardon for Billings (TIME, July 21). In 1916 he told trial juries that he had seen Billings and Mooney with a suitcase, presumably containing the bomb, at the street corner where occurred the explosion that killed ten persons. Last week before the Supreme Justices he swore that he had seen neither of them there, that, in fact, he was not sure if he had really witnessed the bombing...
Because Mooney is a first offender, California's Governor Clement Calhoun Young is empowered to pardon him without the Supreme Court's recommendation, on his own initiative. But because the facts in the two cases are so intertwined, Governor Young was being guided largely by the Supreme Court's hearing in the Billings case. Last week he summoned MacDonald to Sacramento to hear him repeat his recantation...
...Frau Cosima was dead. Son Siegfried had pneumonia. Nearest of kin to great Wilhelm Richard Wagner, in charge of this first evening of the 1930 Bayreuth festival was Siegfried's anxious wife. Yet despite all difficulties Tannhauser soared sonorously, sublimely to its final great choral of pity and pardon. When it was ended critics outdid one another in hailing the performance as the most brilliant Bayreuth opening in years. For Toscanini it was a great night, his Bayreuth debut. To his presence-perhaps his last engagement as an opera conductor -was ascribed an early sell-out of admissions...
Fortnight ago the California Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over the pardon petitions of second offenders, refused to approve the release of Warren Billings, onetime labor agitator jailed for life for bombing San Francisco's Preparedness Day parade 14 years ago. Thomas Mooney, another agitator sentenced with Billings, was only a first offender. He could and did petition Governor Clement Calhoun Young directly (TIME, July 14). Last week the Governor shattered Mooney's immediate hope, refused him a pardon also...