Word: trialing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going poorly when independent counsel Donald Smaltz dumped a glass of water on the computer equipment. As Smaltz tried to make light of the situation, the liquid seeped into the circuitry, shorting out the only high-tech courtroom in Washington's federal courthouse and forcing a recess in the trial of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy...
Last week the jury did a more deliberate version of the same thing, and it was Smaltz who got zapped. After an exhausting seven-week, 70-witness trial, the jury took just nine hours to short-circuit his case against Espy, rejecting all 30 remaining counts of a kitchen-sink indictment. The verdict was not just a repudiation of Smaltz's four-year investigation into gifts Espy received from people his department regulates. It could also be read as a repudiation of the very statute that made Smaltz's wild prosecutorial ride possible. And when that independent-counsel statute comes...
...firms that provided benefits to Espy did so hoping to curry favor with him. And there is no doubt that Espy shouldn't have taken some of the gifts. But Smaltz's critics maintain that Espy's misguided behavior hardly warranted such weighty criminal charges. At trial, Smaltz failed to show that Espy had rewarded any of his gift donors. Though the law doesn't require an explicit quid pro quo, Smaltz had to demonstrate that Espy knew the givers were trying to influence him. Smaltz didn...
...kind of thing officials in Washington and other capitals are starting to take seriously. It is very close to what happened to another ex-President, Chile's General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, in a London hospital in October. Pinochet may end up being shipped off to Spain to stand trial on charges of torture and mass murder. The families of his thousands of victims are rightly cheering, and human-rights activists are delighted that the world may no longer be safe for retired tyrants. But officials in perfectly upstanding governments note that nowhere in the rules now coming into play...
...Clinton Administration is trying both to keep its distance from the case and to work out a clear policy on it. It would be logical for the U.S., going all out against terrorism, to favor a trial for Pinochet. He almost certainly gave the order that sent assassins to blow up a car on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, killing two people...