Word: second-guessing
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...Second-Guess...
...Supreme Court last week vacated that sentence by a 5-to-3 vote. The jury's decision in a capital case is indeed an "awesome responsibility," wrote Justice Thurgood Marshall for the majority, and no prosecutor has the right to denigrate it. Appellate courts, he added, rarely second-guess a jury's sentence, and for prosecutors to suggest otherwise poses "an intolerable danger that the jury will in fact choose to minimize the importance of its role...
...wolf attempts to escape death by baring its throat to a conqueror, the masochist offers a gesture of subservience by attempting to anticipate what an authority figure wants and rushing to comply. But this is not effective in the adult human world, because the masochist is attempting to second-guess what authority figures will do on the basis of her childhood learning...
...federal tribunals had failed utterly to agree on which local functions had to be left alone, and that such decisions are better left to elected representatives in Congress. "The political process ensures that laws that unduly burden the states will not be promulgated," he wrote. Judges should hardly ever second-guess that process, Blackmun added, concluding that the 1976 standard had proved "unsound in principle and unworkable in practice...
Dudley House Master Arthur L. Loeb advocated many of the proposals. "I would favor a period where transfer students didn't have to second-guess the unfavorable rooming statistics at Harvard," Loeb said...