Word: pleadings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pitch usually goes like this: "The district attorney has you dead to rights. But if you plead guilty to a lesser charge and save the state the time and expense of a trial, I will let you off with a light sentence." The offer comes from a judge. The second party to the bargain is a nervous defendant accused of a crime, almost certain to be convicted, and tempted to "cop a plea." The prac tice is one of long standing. And it has advantages for the public as well as the accused: it clears crowded dockets and sometimes extracts...
...result: 90% of U.S. defendants plead guilty and are swiftly sentenced without a trial. In effect, most of them are convicted by the police-not by judges and juries. And since most police insist that interrogation must be secret, the courts have no way of knowing just what led up to the confession. Without tapes, films or neutral witnesses, judges have no way of determining whether a suspect really talked freely or was tricked or bullied into "waiving" his right to silence, or even into confessing falsely-a not unknown reaction to the sinister air of the police station...
...plead with the good councillors to relent, to restore jaywalking to its place among the blissful adventures of college life. But if the City will not act, then the Harvard community must, with a massive campaign of civil disobedience. If the 10,000 men of Harvard are determined to jaywalk, then all the kings and powers of this earth will not stand in their...
Would it? One clue to where the power lay came when General Suharto took to radio and television to declare that "the people are fed up with fake leaders" and to plead for patience in the struggle for a new political and economic order. The Cabinet shakeup, Suharto said, was only the first in a series of steps "which will lead to our ultimate victory." The general's emphasis was on doing things gradually, and his plea was primarily directed toward Djakarta's restive students, who would have liked to see a bigger shake...
...never did-on treaty business. In fact, no President ever again appeared before the Senate to argue a treaty's merits until a desperate Woodrow Wilson did so, in 1919, to plead for approval of the League of Nations. Soon, other countries came wearily to recognize that any treaty concluded with the U.S. President or Secretary of State was, as Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. put it later, "still inchoate, a mere project for a treaty, until the consent of the Senate has been given to it." In general, this practice has been less hampering to U.S. diplomacy than might...