Word: podola
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Outside London's famed Old Bailey last week, Britons by the hundreds queued up hopefully for gallery seats. Inside the venerable courthouse, facing a jury on terms unprecedented in the long annals of English law, sat a slim, stolid, German-born Canadian immigrant named Gunther Fritz Podola...
...Podola case began last July 13, when Podola, 30, allegedly shot and killed a London cop who was trying to question him about a shakedown charge. Cornered three days later in his shabby South Kensington room, Podola was brought out to a police car looking considerably the worse for wear. Two policemen were half dragging him by the arms, and a third walked just ahead as if to keep him from pitching forward. His head was covered with a sack...
...both Parliament and the press there was an immediate outcry. "What action is being taken against the people who beat Podola unconscious?" shouted Laborite Reginald Paget in the House of Commons. Hard-bitten Fleet Street reporters chipped in to pay for Podola's defense. But when the time came for Podola's trial last week, it was neither police brutality nor ordinary insanity at the time of the crime that was offered as Podola's defense. Instead, Defense Counsel Frederick Lawton, Q.C., argued that "a very, very severe fright," possibly triggered by the events of Podola...