Word: kidnapping
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...centuries the roving bandit gangs of Sardinia terrorized the island's people into a grim, submissive silence known as omerta. The impoverished citizenry never dared to speak out against the outlaws, who robbed, kidnaped, blackmailed and murdered virtually without fear of punishment. Lately, the bandits have been pushing the Sardinians a bit harder than usual. They began robbing middle-class citizens as well as the wealthier islanders. They grew more vicious, asking outrageous ransoms and even killing some of their kidnap victims. As a result, the Sardinians have finally rebelled against the tyranny; they are not only breaking their...
...handsome Mesina, an idol to many Sardinian women and youth, surrendered without a fight last month when stopped at a police roadblock. But thousands of his cohorts have managed to elude their pursuers and blithely continue to collect their ransoms. Feeding the specter of fear, they have sent their kidnap victims back home with breathless accounts of their cruelty. "They talked in an atmosphere of bestial excitement," reported wealthy Cattleman Giovanni Campus, 32, whose family paid the bandits $48,000 for his release. "I was imprisoned for 19 days. My nervous system was shattered. Each click of their gun cartridges...
Congress' reaction to the 1932 kidnap-murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby son was shock, rage and a stiff law: "Whoever knowingly transports in interstate commerce any person who has been unlawfully kidnaped and held for ransom or otherwise, shall be punished by death if the kidnaped person has not been liberated unharmed and if the verdict of the jury shall so recommend." Last week, on the basis of the jury verdict last clause, the Supreme Court struck down the Lindbergh law's death-penalty provision...
Objections to the law had been raised by attorneys for Charles ("Batman") Jackson and two henchmen who were accused of a 1966 kidnap during which their victim, a young truck driver, was taken from Connecticut to New Jersey and tied to a tree (he suffered rope burns). The lawyers argued that since the death penalty could only be imposed by a jury, the defendants were being made to risk a harsher punishment if they chose jury trial; by pleading guilty or by asking to be tried by a judge alone, they would not face death. Speaking...
...defense attorneys also attacked the indictment itself as impermissibly vague. By claiming the defendants took part in a nationwide draft resistance movement without specifying its nature, Taylor said, the Government could introduce "evidence of a con- spiracy to assassinate General Hershey and kidnap members of the draft boards." The indictment's vagueness, the defense lawyers said, made it impossible for the five men to know what evidence would be produced against them, or how to prepare to refute...