Word: rap
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...often happens in great constitutional dramas, the starring player was a nobody: Danny Escobedo, 26, 5 ft. 5 in., 106 Ibs., a Chicago laborer serving 20 years for first-degree murder. Like most convicts, Danny was sure he had taken a bum rap. In his case, the Supreme Court agreed. Danny had confessed to complicity in his brother-in-law's murder, but only after Chicago police had refused to let him see his lawyer, who was in the station house trying to see him.* Not only did the court void Danny's confession: it held that every...
...brilliant deduction. What it takes is tedious, routine police work-hiring informers, watching known burglars, and questioning suspicious persons. Even then, a prime suspect may not confess and "clear the books" of all those unsolved burglaries until he is offered a deal, such as concurrent sentences equaling the rap for just one burglary. "Despite modern advances in the technology of crime detection," summed up the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, "offenses frequently occur about which things cannot be made to speak. And where there cannot be found innocent human witnesses to such offenses, nothing remains-if police investigation...
...seems a threat to any healthy policewoman; yet he has managed to get himself picked up twice for "investigation" and arrested five times on charges ranging from assault to murder, including two arrests since his release for packing a pistol and selling barbiturates. So far, he has beaten every rap...
...with a cute actress in the play he was watching. There was an argument. Mary Lincoln drew a .44 derringer from her handbag and fired the fatal shot. John Wilkes Booth happened to pass the presidential box at that moment. Being a true Southern gentleman, he gallantly took the rap for the first lady...
...chief sleepwalker is a distinguished barrister (Ray Milland), in the dock on a murder rap for killing a judge. Milland had threatened to kill the man responsible for the hit-and-run death of his daughter, and the judge was a bum driver-certainly enough circumstantial evidence to suit anybody. After a lifetime of scrutinizing the criminal mind, Milland is such a right honorable chump that he harbors on his own staff an ex-con who spent 15 years preparing the frame-up to revenge himself on both judge and barrister. Enough clues turn up at the Old Bailey...