Word: youngster
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...fashion: by voluntarily getting fingerprinted. The phenomenon has swept communities throughout the nation; it has sometimes been spurred by a local tragedy, sometimes by the many articles about missing children or the recent film Without a Trace, based loosely on the disappearance in 1979 of a New York City youngster, Etan Patz. The purpose of the fingerprinting is to aid law enforcement agencies in the event that one's child becomes one of the 50,000 who are abducted by strangers each year...
...parents usually keep the only records. Some states, including Texas and Vermont, for bid law enforcement agencies to file the prints of juveniles. But a number of communities are considering allowing police or schools to have copies of the documents; critics attack this practice as a violation of a youngster's constitutional rights to privacy and against selfincrimination...
Lawyers try to frame simple questions that give the youngster a concrete sense of abstract concepts. In the successful California prosecution of Kidnaper Kenneth Parnell, for example, Deputy District Attorney George McClure established his witness's competence by picking up a pen and asking the victim, Timmy White, then six, "Timmy, if I told you this thing in my hand is an ice cream cone, would it be the truth or a lie?" To put children at ease, some judges bend courtroom rules a bit. In one Seattle trial, a 5½-year-old witness was allowed...
...efforts to ease the child's natural problems in the witness chair, the experience can still be traumatic (as it often is for adults). In abuse cases, for example, youngsters must relive acutely painful incidents, and they frequently feel that they are the ones on trial. Those considerations recently cost Philadelphia Prosecutor William Heiman his sexual abuse case against the father of a four-year-old girl. She was the sole witness, and Heiman could not bring in her mother to relate what the youngster had told her because that would be inadmissible hearsay. The girl was not forced...
...Ever since he was a youngster in England, Clive Sinclair, 42, has had big thoughts about little things. At twelve, he built small mechanical calculators. At 22, after a brief stint as a science writer and editor specializing in home electronics, Sinclair and his wife Anne set up a mail order house selling transistors and later kits for miniradios no bigger than match boxes. In the 1970s he made one of the earliest pocket calculators with advanced mathematical functions, designed a pioneering, inexpensive digital wristwatch, and introduced a tiny TV with a 2-in. screen. Ahead of their time, none...