Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...arbitrary way in which capital punishment was imposed, 34 states have rewritten their death penalty laws to conform with the court's guidelines. State courts have imposed death sentences on about 500 people, nearly half of them black men and all but one of them convicted of murder. Opponents of capital punishment fear that Spenkelink's death, ending an unofficial moratorium, may lead to a wave of executions. Most of them will be in the Deep South, which has traditionally led the nation in imposing that penalty...
...self-defense: the muscular, 230-lb. Szymankiewicz, said the defendant, had stolen $8,000 from him, forced him at gunpoint to perform fellatio and made him play Russian roulette. But the wounds were all from behind, and the jury took only 3½ hours to convict Spenkelink of murder and sentence him to death. His lawyers filed 22 appeals, claiming that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, that it is unfairly applied more often to murderers of whites than of blacks and that the jury was improperly selected. Judges called some of the arguments "frivolous" and "shams...
...that does not mean any lack of support for sentences that have been pronounced by the revolutionary courts against officials who used torture and murder as instruments of policy. In one hourlong televised interview last week, a former interrogator for SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, broke down as he delivered a chilling account of the atrocities that had been committed during the Shah's reign. At the end, the announcer asked...
...from genial irony to grim satire. Every few weeks a sour mood fills the "Observer," as it did some time ago when Baker discussed the advantages of a return to public hangings, with the additional suggestion that if the society went back to killing people for the crime of murder, perhaps it should again cut off hands for theft and notch the noses of incurable double parkers...
White did not plead not guilty by reason of insanity, largely because no psychiatrist would say that he was sufficiently deranged. Schmidt asked the jury to find that White's "diminished mental capacity" left him unable to premeditate, deliberate, or harbor malice, the standards for first degree murder. One defense expert, Dr. Jerry Jones, told the jury that what White suffered from was "not the blues, what you and I call being depressed." It was genetically caused melancholia, "as if the world were viewed through black glasses." Another defense doctor refused to elevate White's condition...