Word: voir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main reasons for all the waiting in many courts is the long and sometimes pointless interrogations known as voir dire. Scene: a maple-paneled room in Manhattan Supreme Court. At issue: a small drug sale. "Are you living with anybody?" the defense lawyer asks a middle-aged widow. The woman looks uncomfortable. "We're not gossip columnists," the judge intervenes. "We only want to ask questions that determine if you are a fair and impartial juror. Many people nowadays live together." The woman says she lives alone. The questioning continues...
...worst thing is not the irrelevant questions," says one survivor of voir dire, "but the fact that you're locked into a dingy room with 30 other would-be jurors and two or more lawyers, who then proceed to pound each of you with the same questions. This can take a half-hour or more for each juror, and then you have to hear it all over and over again. After a day or so, you'll grab at anything...
...Propulsion Laboratory, in the foothills near Pasadena, who designed the spacecraft and control its mission. They fear that U.S. ambitions in interplanetary space may be rapidly dwindling, but the President announced the inclusion of $40 million in start-up funding in the fiscal 1982 budget for VOIR. That is an acronym for the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar mission, a new project that had been eagerly sought by J.P.L., along with an unmanned probe to intercept Halley's comet when it returns in 1986. So far the U.S. has refused to authorize the tantalizing mission to the comet. Said J.P.L...