Word: specked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Corazon Pieza Amurao, 24, stepped down from the witness stand. The pretty petite (4 ft. 10 in.) Philippine girl, who alone survived the massacre last summer in which eight fellow student nurses were stabbed or strangled to death in a South Side Chicago apartment, walked toward Defendant Richard F. Speck, 25, and raised her hand toward his head. "This," she said firmly...
That confrontation, carried out with a minimum of emotion and a maximum of drama, climaxed the first week of the trial. Speck, who has received more careful legal and physical protection than any other murder suspect in recent history (his trial was shifted from Chicago for fear of adverse publicity), is represented by Public Defender Gerald Getty, 53, none of whose 80 odd murder defendants has ever received a death sentence. The accused, sometime merchant seaman and ex-convict, seemed to have been crossed up only by the one event of July 13 that the killer had overlooked. By rolling...
Death Verdict? To greater or lesser extent, all of these factors weighed in the Speck voir dire. For his part, State's Attorney William Martin, 30, took a cool approach. "Where the crime speaks for itself," he said, "it is not for us to seek the sympathy of the jurors." Though he was searching for the relatives of policemen, nurses and young girls, Martin mainly focused on reactions to the most important question: "Do you have any conscientious or religious objections to the death penalty...
...point, "I'm charged with defending this guy, and I don't want twelve persons in there with fixed opinions, do I?" Man to man, he reasoned with would-be jurors. "And you," he said to one venireman, "would you have difficulty in presuming Richard Speck innocent...
Getty then went over all the possible verdicts Speck might receive, asking whether the venireman would be willing to sign "not guilty" if he was in doubt and whether he would accept a jail sentence instead of death if Speck was found guilty. The venireman insisted that he could sign "not guilty," and that he could agree to a jail sentence. Getty asked the question again; suddenly the man did a turnabout, blurting out that the only verdict he could accept was the death penalty. Excused, for cause...