Word: lessers
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...N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund's long war against executions, contended that even if the new laws require neutral enforcement of the death penalty there is inevitably "play" in the system. Prosecutors, for example, can always decide against bringing a capital charge and juries can convict for a lesser offense. This "elaborate winnowing process," said Amsterdam, means that only an arbitrarily selected few are sentenced to death...
...view in the working experience of other mandatory sentencing laws. In 1970, first-degree murder in Pennsylvania carried a mandatory punishment of life imprisonment, but a team of researchers, led by University of Chicago Law Professor Franklin Zimring, reports in a forthcoming study that plea bargaining and lesser charges were regularly used to evade the law's intent, suggesting to the authors "that legislation prescribing mandatory capital punishment for premeditated or felony-murder would not be mandatory in effect." Supporters of mandatory executions answer that the new capital punishment laws do as well as is humanly and systemically possible...
...bailing kids out of jail to helping faithful Daley followers find city jobs to assuring that garbage pickups and street repairs are made. On election day, the precinct captains strove mightily to meet the voter turnout quotas expected of them. The captains pointedly greeted voters by their names, while lesser machine workers carefully checked off against neighborhood lists those people who showed up at the polls. By midafternoon, if a "safe" voter had not shown up, a runner was dispatched to bring him in before closing time...
Wilson often suggested that he never expected to rise to Churchillian heights. "I'm the lesser of two evils," he once said of himself and the Tories. Measured by his own modest standards, he did not do all that badly for his country. While he failed to inspire, he at least proved that Britain was still governable. It was, after all, barely more than a year ago that some British rightists were muttering about fielding private armies to take on the unions, and even the staid London Times was wondering whether this was Britain's "last-chance Parliament...
Martin holds an orthodox Catholic view of spiritual history: God and his fallen angel Satan are engaged in a struggle for the souls of men. One of Satan's tools, through lesser spirits, is the possession of humans. And so Martin provides us with the case histories of five possessed Americans and details their successful exorcisms...