Word: pretrial
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Under the new federal rules a trial becomes more an orderly search for truth, less a tournament of wits. Key to the new system is the pretrial setup, which permits the free use of depositions, interrogatories, inspections and examinations, all aimed at finding the facts on which the litigants are agreed and at defining the areas of disagreement. At the pretrial conference both plaintiff and defendant state what they expect to prove in the trial, thus eliminating tricky surprise. The judge dictates a pretrial order that supersedes the original pleadings and defines the questions at issue between the parties. Says...
...Sicilian accused of murder, he refused to send out for special meals, ate instead the plain prison fare of boiled beef and bread. "This is as good a time as any to follow the diet my doctor recommended," he said. And from a pretty quarter, he got a pretrial assist. Cinemactress Alida Valli, a onetime sojourner in Hollywood (The Third Man), announced what she considered to be an alibi for Piero. Two days before Wilma Montesi's body was found, she said, Piero had been with her, Alida, and then had gone home with a bad cold...
Sound from the Neck. To nobody's great surprise, the lone journalistic voice raised in all-out defense of a ban on pretrial reporting came from Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who is having his own court troubles (see below). Said Pegler in his column: "The contention that [such a ban] would violate freedom of the press is only a neck-sound unrelated to the heart of the subject...
...controversy began three weeks ago when Wechsler appeared at a pretrial hearing in a $1,000,000 libel suit filed against the Post by Editor Jack Lait of Hearst's New York Mirror and Nightclub Columnist Lee Mortimer. They charged that they were libeled in the Post's review of their book, U.S.A. Confidential (TIME, May 26). At the hearing, Wechsler testified to some personal history that had already been widely publicized: at 18, when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University, he joined the Young Communist League and quit 3½ years later. Wechsler has never concealed...
McCarthy the Witness. McCarthy was off to a downtown law office, where he was giving a pretrial deposition in the libel suit brought against him by Columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson was also suing for $250,000 damages for "unprovoked physical assault" during a party at the Sulgrave Club...