Word: superiors
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Votes on the first ballot were still being counted when the 211 electors who had gathered at Jesuit headquarters in Rome began to applaud. By an overwhelming margin, the general congregation of the Society of Jesus last week chose its new superior general: the Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, 54, a Dutch priest highly respected within the church's largest religious order of men (26,000 members) for his piety, scholarship and skills as a prudent diplomat...
...first-degree murder, a ruling now under appeal. Wheel and Delaney were exercising this legal authority in their roles as "assistant judges." Also known as side judges, these officials are ordinary citizens with no legal training who are elected to sit beside the state's law-trained superior court judges and share much of their judicial power. There are 28 of these citizen judges in Vermont, two in each of the state's 14 counties. They sit on both jury and nonjury cases and are elected for four-year terms...
...criminal proceedings, the superior courts have tended to hear only murder and kidnaping cases. Some assistant judges are upset with a 1982 law that allows prosecutors to take even those cases to district courts, where there are no assistant judges. Side Judge Wheel contends that "this is one place where the people's judges should sit, particularly for the sentencing of one human being who has taken the life of another...
Sentencing is a matter of great interest to many side judges. In Windsor County last year Louis Hamlin, a high school student, was convicted of murdering a twelve-year-old girl. Superior Court Judge Thomas Hayes, who described the proceedings as "the most controversial murder case in Vermont in a long, long time," would have sentenced Hamlin to 35 years. But his two assistant judges insisted on adding another ten years. Says one local court observer: "That made the assistant judges even more popular." (Hamlin is appealing the assistant judges' action...
...trained superior court judges are well aware of the side judges' popularity. Says Judge John Meaker: "If it develops confidence in the judicial system, then it serves an important role." Some jurists are not convinced that they need any help from assistant judges. Chief Justice Franklin Billings of the state's supreme court thinks "their use as far as the law is concerned has been outdated." Says Montpelier Attorney Robert Kurrle: "Lay people are just not as sensitive as lawyers to questions of due process...