Word: prisoner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...A.B.A. should initiate a "comprehensive and profound examination" of the penal system, which would cover everything from prison conditions to parole and probation. Claiming that U.S. law offers the accused the world's most comprehensive system of trials, retrials, appeals and post-conviction reviews, Burger said: "If I were sure-and I am not sure either way-that all this was good for the accused in the large and long-range sense that it helps him, I would be enthusiastically in favor of all of it." Among the rehabilitation techniques that the Chief Justice believes should be thoroughly studied...
...During a medical-malpractice suit in a Kentucky federal district court last year, Judge Henry Brooks refused to seat any women on the jury. His motive was pure chivalry. The plaintiff, a state convict named Ernest Abbott, was suing two prison doctors for failing to detect a cancer in its early stages. At the time, he suffered from advanced cancer of the penis and groin, and Judge Brooks wanted to spare women the details of medical testimony that might be "distasteful." Abbott lost his suit, and later died. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has ruled that...
Though Arthur, the son of a Baptist preacher, was only 15, he was thrown in with adult convicts at the Leflore County prison farm. There a Negro "trusty" named Columbus Williams, who was serving time for assault and battery with intent to kill, was entrusted with a 12-gauge shotgun to guard other prisoners. One day Williams led a chain gang into the countryside to repair a bridge. During a lunch break, he ordered a prisoner to fetch him a rag to clean his shoes. The man refused, and Williams turned to Arthur, who also refused...
...much of that. But the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, composed mostly of young attorneys from the North, brought a damage suit in the U.S. District Court in Greenwood. They did not bother to serve a summons on Williams, who by then was out of prison and living in Chicago. Instead, they served ten white officials, including Leflore County Sheriff John Arterbury, superintendent of the prison farm at the time of the shooting...
Arterbury pointed out that it was common in the South for prison wardens to economize by assigning prisoners to guard other inmates; he claimed that the shooting was an accident. But Arthur's lawyers argued that Williams' record made him unfit to be trusted with firearms. Since the defense did not ask for a jury, the decision was up to Federal Judge William Keady. Late last month Keady ordered Arterbury to pay $85,000 in damages to Arthur. "The moral sense of all reasonable men," said the judge, "would be shocked by the punishment visited upon the plaintiff...