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...marked CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY. The cards, arranged face down, each bore the name of one of the district's ten active judges. After freeing the top card with a letter opener, the clerk found before him the name of the trial judge whom he had just selected at random: Julius J. Hoffman...
Royal-Flush Odds. Even random selection techniques fail when the lists are unfairly drawn to begin with. In a recent New York case, for example, Attorney Michael Finkelstein produced evidence showing that a federal grand jury list included only 1.1 of every 10,000 voters in Harlem, compared with 62.6 of every 10,000 voters from the city's fashionable and predominantly white East Side. A statistician testified that the chances of obtaining that disparity in a random selection were smaller than the probability of a poker player being dealt 24 consecutive royal flushes in a fair game...
More impressive are the individual performances of black pros. A random check of the records shows that in baseball, for example, a Negro has won the National League's Most Valuable Player award 16 times in the past 20 years. The National Basketball Association's M.V.P. award has gone to a black twelve times in the last 15 years. And last season, all four Rookie of the Year awards for offense and defense in the two pro football leagues were won by blacks...
...Black English" is not an illiterate language, as many think, but remarkably rich in nuances. According to Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, "many of these poets are turning to the grammar, the punctuation, the language through which subculture blacks in particular have resisted total Westernization. Black dialect-if you want to call it that-is probably more subtle and sophisticated than standard white English." In standard English, she says, "there are only two present tenses-I work, I am working. In English as spoken in white Appalachia, there are three -I work, I am working...
Initially, two checkerboard patterns of 10.000 black and white dots, called the Julesz random-dot stereograms, were employed to test her stereoscopic vision (the ability to see two images...