Word: drifters
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Richard Speck, the half-mad drifter who murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, was sentenced to death five years ago, but in the wake of Supreme Court rulings against capital punishment, he cannot be executed. His odd prediction: "As sure as having Jesus Christ on one side and the devil on the other, and a wheelbarrow filled with four or five million dollars in the middle, I'm going to get 500 to 1,000 years." Judge Richard J. Fitzgerald went even further. He imposed a sentence of 50 to 150 years for each murder, consecutively, a total...
...ironies of justice is that noble legal principles sometimes derive from ignoble lives. So it was with Andrew Mallory, a 19-year-old drifter from South Carolina, who was arrested in Washington in 1954 on a charge of choking and raping a 38-year-old woman while she was doing her laundry. The police interrogated him for seven hours and got him to confess. The trial was delayed a year because of doubt that Mallory could understand the proceedings against him, but he was eventually sentenced to the electric chair. "May God have mercy on your soul," said the judge...
...smudge of gunsmoke. The candidate would capsize backward, the cameras would catch a wild, stricken frieze as his young wife knelt over him, staining her suit with his blood, and the bodyguards, an instant too late, would wrestle down some strange little drifter with a pistol welded to his hand...
...recent movies have all been presented as evil. Michael York in Something for Everyone and Terence Stamp in Feorema and Entertaining Mr. Sloan victimize the families they visit with their domineering sexual attractiveness, while Murray Head's characterization in Sunday Bloody Sunday is that of a callous and irresponsible drifter. Where movies have never experienced many qualms in dismissing homosexuality by equating it with impotency (except, of course, when a child entered the room--for only then did the homosexual become a clear and present danger), when dealing with bisexuality, they retreat in fear. Since sex in the movies...
...talks, she plays her favorite song on the jukebox, over and over; it serves as a background, an aural prop for the kind of good-time life she would like to think she's leading. She, like most of the "regulars" who show up that night, is a drifter whose fever to move on turns her into a garrulous, unattractive mama, every time she stops her trailer, her loneliness drives her to shack up with any man she can find, but her cares are always divorced from the present...