Test: Criminal Law

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15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5
16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5
Total: Total: Total: Total: Total:

I. Ex. Pre-reading tasks:

 Why are the crimes committed?

 Is law necessary? In what way?

It’s not difficult to understand that law is
necessary not just because there are a lot of
No one knows why crime occurs. There are other offences, according to this theory.
bad people in the world. Even if we were all
plenty of theories on this subject. The oldest Nowadays’ theories say that crime is caused
good the law would still be necessary. We
theory says that people commit crimes byneed different certain rules factors
of behaviour.– How biological,
would
deliberately, that the devil or other evil spirits psychological, cultural, economic
you drive a car if there were to traffic rules? and
make them do it. Another theory says that political. A lot of good people could be killed in car
criminals were not brought up properly by their It was long
accidents. ago would
Or what when people
you do ifdecided
you wentto
parents. In the 19th century crime was thought to make laws for themselves in self-protection.
to a greengrocer, bought some potatoes and
be the result of poor living conditions: people We know
found on nothing abouthome
your return laws that
whichtheyexisted
were
unable to support their families in a legal way before
mouldthe or invention
even some of of
writing
them inwere
about 3500
stones?
are driven to theft, burglary, prostitution and B.C. What The earliest
could you known legalwere
do if there text no
waslaws on
written by Ur-Nammu, a king of the the subject? In the absence of law you cold
Mesopotamian city of Ur, in about 2100 B.C. One only rely on the law of the jungle. You could
of the most detailed ancient legal codes was written go back to the shop, demand proper potatoes
in about 1758 B.C. by Hamurabi. 282 paragraphs of and hit the shopkeeper on the nose if he
this code were carved into a great stone pillar. refused to give them to you.
Every country tries to provide laws which
will help people to live safely. This is not an
easy thing to do. Laws are made up by
people, and people are not perfect creatures,
they tend to make mistakes. That’s why there
are no perfect laws, but even those which
exist are still better than nothing at all.
 1. Exercise:

Answer the questions, according to the text.

What are the theories of crime?

What are the earliest known legal texts?

Why is law necessary?

Why are laws imperfect?

2. Match a word on the left with its definition on the right:

accomplice 1. attacks and robs people in the street

arsonist 2. breaks into houses and other buildings to steal
assassin 3. steals from shops
bigamist 4. sets fire to property illegally
burglar 5. kills someone
deserter 6. destroys public property
drug dealer 7. steals things from people’s pockets / bags in crowded places
forger 8. gets secret information from another country
hijacker 9. buys and sells drugs illegally
hooligan 10. takes away people by force and demands money for their return
gangster 11. helps a criminal in a crime
kidnapper 12. uses violence for political reasons
mugger 13. causes disturbance in public places
murderer 14. takes control of a plane by force
pickpocket 15. murders for political reasons or reward
robber 16. someone who steals
shoplifter 17. makes false money or signatures
smuggler 18. a member of a criminal group
spy 19. steals money etc. by force from people or places (e.g. banks)
terrorist 20. marries illegally being married already
thief 21. a soldier who runs away from the army
traitor 22. brings goods into a country illegally
vandal 23. betrays country to another state

3.Fill in the gaps:

CRIME CRIMINAL ACTION TRANSLATION

ARSON ARSONIST TO SET FIRE ПІДПАЛ
TO ASSAULT
ASSASSIN
шантаж(-увати)
 BURGLAR
DESERTION
EMBEZZLER
TO FORGE
ROBBERY
HACKING
TO HIJACK
KIDNAPPER
MUGGING
вбивство
PICKPOCKET
TO POACH
RAPE
перевозити
нелегально
SHOPLIFTING
TERRORIST
зрадник
VANDALISM

4. What do we call:

a. the lawyers acting for an accused person;

b. 12 people who listen to the case and give their verdict;

c. the person who directs proceedings, explains the legal aspect of the case and
passes sentence on the accused;

d. the lawyers who conduct legal proceedings against the defendant;

e. the person who gives evidence in the court under oath.

5. Put in the right prepositions:

1. He was sentenced … five years.

2. She got a sentence … six months.
3. He was accused … murder.
4. She’s been charged … theft.
5. He appeared … court … handcuffs.
6. They were brought … the judge.
7. He confessed … being a spy … military intelligence.

6. Complete the sentences by filling in the gaps with words and phrases below.

revocation of a privilege (eg. driver`s licence, hunting permit); prison term; probation; court
warning; parole; capital punishment; community service; fine

1. Because she was a minor without a prior record, the young teenager was let off with a
____________.
2. The US is one of the last countries in the Western world which still imposes
________________________ for murder.
3. Considering his long criminal history, the judge sentenced the thief to a 10-year
________________.
4. Due to good behavior, the inmate was released on _______________________ after having
served only a third of his sentence.
5. Many say that imposing a _________________ on people who speed is an inadequate form of
punishment.
6. The actor was ordered to do sixty hours of ___________________ after being arrested for
fighting in a public place.
7. It is forbidden for those on _____________________to leave their city or county of
residence.
8. ____________________ is effective in that it restricts your right to do something that you
normally take for granted.

7. Do the task:
Business tycoon, George Henderson, aged 45, was found murdered last night in the
library of his mansion. Police detectives are questioning the four suspects pictured
below. Read the information about the victim and the suspects and decide who the
murderer could be. Use may/might, could, must, can’t
e.g. A: The butler might have committed the crime because he desperately needed the money.
B: I don’t agree. He can’t have murdered Henderson because he was considered to be a
loyal employee etc.

Charlotte Henderson (the wife)

Henderson and his wife Charlotte had been separated for seven months. She was not living in
the mansion at the time of the murder, although she still had a key! The divorce was not yet
final when the murder occurred. Charlotte believed she’d probably be awarded very little
money in the divorce case. She says she was at the home of Henderson’s lawyer when the
murder occurred.

Roy Smith (the butler)

The butler’s mother is very ill, but his salary is too low to pay for the surgery she needs, even
though he had been working for Henderson for twenty years. He was considered by all to be a
loyal employee. He claims that at the time of the murder he was watching a documentary on
TV Channel 3.

Claudine Dupont (the maid)

George Henderson’s maid for the past two years, Claudine was believed to be a reliable employee. She
says she was washing Henderson’s supper dishes in the mansion’s kitchen at the time of the murder.

George Henderson (the victim)

The multi-millionaire had been stabbed in the back about 10 pm. No murder weapon was found. The
victim had been watching a documentary on TV Channel 3 when he was killed. His supper tray was
found on a table in the library; the food had not been touched!
 8. Give the definitions and translate the words.

to kidnap –
accused –
arson –
assault –
blackmail –
to break the law –
offence –
burglary –
prosecution –
to charge sb with sth –
to confess to sth –
ransom –
to commit a crime –
to be sentenced to –
defendant –
shoplifting –
to smuggle –
to detain / hold a person –
drug-trafficking –
suspicion -
evidence / testimony –
thief –
fine –
fraud –
to defraud –
guilty –
to plead guilty –
vandalism –
hijacker –
innocent –
verdict –
victim –
investigation –
jury –
to keep in custody –
witness –
on parole-

9. Find out a suitable term to the definition:

1)
a) a person thought to be guilty of a crime or offence
b) a person who inquires, esp. deeply, searchingly
c) legal proceeding in a court; a judicial contest to determine and enforce legal rights
the final judgment in a legal proceeding; the act of pronouncing judgment based on the
evidence presented
d) the party instituting or conducting legal proceedings against someone in a lawsuit
e) questioning of a witness by the party which has called that witness to give evidence, in
support of the case being made
2)
a) illegally sets fire to property
b) steals from purses and wallets in public placed
c) kills people for political reasons and is often hired to do the deed
d) unlawfully seizes and detains a victim (usually for ransom)
e) takes things from a shop without paying

3)
a) counterfeits money, documents, etc.
b) performs the unlawful premeditated killing of another human being
c) betrays his/her country, friend, company, etc.
d) enters a building with intent to steal
e) forces another person to have sexual intercourse

4)
a) is an unlicensed dealer in illegal drugs
b) employs terror as a political weapon
c) uses force to take over a vehicle (especially an airplane) in order to reach an alternative
destination
d) willfully destroys or defaces property
e) hides aboard a ship or plane in the hope of getting free passage

5)
a) enters a marriage when the imports or exports without paying duties
b) previous marriage has not been terminated
c) is a member of a gang of violent criminals
d) written laws passed by a legislative body
e) the system of rules that a particular country recognizes as regulating the actions of its
members

10. Fill in the gaps:

1. A ________________ who committed a series of sexual offences over two decades has
been jailed for 20 years.
2. A ________________ who created up to 1,000 bogus paintings – selling many to
unsuspecting buyers – has been jailed for two years.

3. A ________________ who may have been seriously injured attempting to steal electrical
cable has been urged to go to hospital by the police.
4. A 25-year-old woman has fought off a ________________ who attempted to steal her car
at traffic lights.
5. A convicted ________________ who then got involved with cocaine has been jailed for
five years and one month.
6. A convicted cigarette ________________ has been jailed for three years for failing to pay a
£500,000 confiscation order.

7. A family of ________________ who stole mobile phones and cash from sleeping train
passengers between London and Kent, have been jailed.
8. An alleged ________________ is to stand trial accused of marrying another woman while
his wife was alive.
 9 An alleged teenage ________________ flooded a house while trying to steal copper piping
during a three-day drink and drugs binge.
10. The case has stirred up strong emotions among watching survivors, with some shouting
“________________” and “killer” from the court gallery.

11. Make up a story:

1) Imagine that you are a criminal reporter with a local newspaper. What crimes you are going,
to describe to the readers. Why? Give your reasons.
2) “Mobile phone theft is major crime…” What do you think of it? Give your reasons.
3) Imagine that on the way to the University this morning you’ve seen a robbery. What would
you do in such a situation? Give reasons to your statements.
4) You happened to be a witness of a crime. Give you descriptions of the criminal.
5) You know in the modern world there is a great problem of drugs and alcohol. What do you
think of the vital role of drug addiction and alcohol consumption in the growing crime rate
and in juvenile delinquency in particular? State your opinion giving reasons.

12. Write an essay:

1) Crime and Punishment (types of offence).

2) A legal procedure in civil and criminal cases.
3) The problem of juvenile delinquency.
4) Death penalty: for or against.
5) Crime doesn’t pay.

13. The first sentence is in the ACTIVE VOICE. Choose the most correct way of
saying the same thing in the PASSIVE VOICE:

1. They passed me up for that position.

I ________________ for that position.
was passed up
was being passed up
am passed up

2. By tomorrow, I will have bought the car.

By tomorrow, the car ________________ by me.
was being bought
will have been bought
was bought

3. John bought the Picasso painting.

The Picasso painting ________________ by John.
was bought
will have been bought
 is bought

4. Most students misunderstand this story.

This story ________________ by most students.
was misunderstood
has been misunderstood
is misunderstood

5. My brother carried the groceries into the room.

The groceries ________________ by my brother into the room.
were being carried
have been carried
were carried

6. Juan is preparing the enchiladas.

The enchiladas ________________ by Juan.
are being prepared
were being prepared
are prepared

7. His brother was telling him to calm down.

He ________________ to calm down by his brother.
is being told
was being told
is told

8. A dog bit me.

I ________________ by a dog.
was being bitten
was bitten
have been bitten

9. The movers have delivered the furniture.

The furniture ________________ by the movers.
will have been delivered
would be delivered
has been delivered

10. This city will surprise you. You ________________ by this city.
are surprised
 will be surprised
will have been surprised

14. Look at the subject and verb to determine if it is an active or passive sentence. Then
add the appropriate verb. Be careful with intransitive verbs (verbs that do not have an
object – they cannot be used in the passive voice.)

1. The performance (happen) right now. Let’s go.

2. I’ll be happy if our plan (succeed).
3. The server (order) to clean up the mess he had made.
4. The judge ordered that smoking (prohibit) in restaurants.
5. His grandfather (pass away) years ago.

6. Janet rode an airplane yesterday for the first time. The airplane, which
(operate) by Singapore Airlines, (fly) by an experienced pilot.
7. I wouldn’t have complained if the food (not/be) overcooked.
8. That car looks like it has never (wash).
9. If I were you, I would (contact) a lawyer.
10. Have you (inform) yet about the new policy?
11. Unfortunately, the budget has (not/approve) yet.
12. A smile (appear) on her face.

15. Summarize the text in English:

Text 1.
Robert Durst Charged with 2nd-Degree Murder in His Wife’s Disappearance
Mr. Durst, who was sentenced to life in prison in California two weeks ago, now faces
another trial in New York. Kathie McCormack Durst, the young wife of a real estate scion,
returned to the couple’s weekend cottage in South Salem, N.Y., on the evening of Jan. 31,
1982, and after yet another argument with her husband, she vanished.
There was no note to her mother, Ann, to her sisters and brother, or her friends. Her
disappearance started a nearly 40-year-long saga that has included criminal investigations,
breathless media coverage, books, a film and a documentary, much of it centered around her
now-notorious husband, Robert A. Durst.
Now, decades after her disappearance — and just weeks after Mr. Durst was convicted
of murder in another woman’s death in Los Angeles — prosecutors in Westchester, N.Y., say
they can finally prove what many have long suspected.
Mr. Durst, a one-time heir to a real estate empire whose towers are strung across
Manhattan, was indicted in White Plains on Monday on a single count of second-degree
murder that accuses him of killing Kathie Durst when she was 29 and months away from
fulfilling her dream of becoming a doctor.
“For nearly four decades there has been a great deal of speculation about this case,
much of it fueled by Robert Durst’s own highly publicized statements,” Miriam E. Rocah, the
Westchester district attorney, said in a statement. “An indictment is a crucial step in the
process of holding wrongdoers accountable for their actions.”
Mr. Durst, who has since been tried for two different murders and convicted once, has
long insisted that he did not kill his wife, whose body has never been found. Chip Lewis, a
Houston criminal defense lawyer who represented Mr. Durst at trials in Texas in 2003 and
Los Angeles in 2021, called the new charge “fake news.”
But Mr. Durst has acknowledged that he was violent toward his wife on the night of
her disappearance. He told the producers of the 2015 documentary, “The Jinx: The Life and
Deaths of Robert Durst,” that he engaged in a “pushing, shoving argument” with Kathie Durst
that night in South Salem, about 50 miles northeast of Manhattan.
The case, the first in which Mr. Durst was implicated, in some ways represents a
fitting conclusion to the long, strange legal odyssey surrounding him. Over the years of
suspicion that followed his wife’s disappearance, his bizarre affect and disarming manner in
interviews made him an irresistible subject for true-crime stories.
For the investigators who long pursued him, Mr. Durst proved to be a challenging
adversary. Only this year was he finally convicted of murder. Just two weeks before the
Westchester County indictment, Mr. Durst, 78 and frail, was sentenced in Los Angeles to life
without parole for the murder of his confidante Susan Berman in December 2000. The jury in
that case found that Mr. Durst had shot Ms. Berman in the back of her head because he feared
she was about to reveal to investigators what she knew about the disappearance and murder of
Kathie Durst.
Ms. Berman, a journalist and screenwriter who was living in New York in 1982,
arranged interviews with the city’s tabloids for Mr. Durst at the time his wife disappeared.
Both of them told police and reporters that Ms. Durst was drug-addled and in danger of
flunking out of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, contrary to school officials and academic
records.
Absent new physical evidence in Ms. Durst’s disappearance, the Los Angeles case is
likely to provide a road map of sorts for prosecutors in New York.
Many of the prosecution witnesses in Los Angeles are likely to show up in
Westchester, including Mike Struk, the now-retired detective who first got the case; Karen
Minutello, the building manager who said that Mr. Durst threw out Ms. Durst’s textbooks and
other belongings days after she disappeared; medical school classmates in whom Ms. Durst
confided her fears about her husband’s violence; and Ms. Durst’s sister Mary and her husband
Tom, who discovered the so-called Dig Note in a wastebasket in the South Salem cottage.
Mr. Durst testified in Los Angeles that the note was not a to-do list for getting rid of a
body, but rather shorthand for “digital,” an uncommon word in 1982.
Fadwa Najamy, one of the last people to see Ms. Durst alive, testified in Los Angeles
that Ms. Durst had shown up at her family’s house in Connecticut before she disappeared and
that Mr. Durst had phoned there asking her to come home. After Ms. Durst’s disappearance,
her close friend, Gilberte Najamy, Fadwa Najamy’s sister, frantically searched for clues to
what happened to Kathie and told police that Mr. Durst was responsible.
“May he live to be 100 so he can spend more time in jail after what he did to Kathie
and my sister,” Fadwa Najamy said in an interview last week. Gilberte Najamy is no longer
alive.
Ruth Mayer, who lived next door to the Dursts in 1982, said she was fond of Ms.
Durst and has long felt “an obligation to do whatever I can do.”
On the Sunday morning when Ms. Durst was last seen, Ms. Mayer brought her a hat to
fend off the icy temperature, she said.
“It is justice delayed,” she said of the indictment.
Robert Abrams, a lawyer representing the McCormack family, declined to comment.
Mr. Durst, who was briefly on a ventilator after testing positive for Covid-19, was
transferred Oct. 27 from Twin Towers Correctional Facility to the California Health Care
Facility, a prison for inmates with long-term or severe health problems in Stockton, Calif., 90
miles east of San Francisco. It is the same prison where Phil Spector, the once-celebrated
music producer, spent his final years after his conviction for killing a woman in his home.
Now, Mr. Durst faces the prospect of extradition to New York and a cell in the New
York prison system. His credibility has been shredded by the conflicting accounts that he
offered to investigators and interviewers, especially after he admitted in Los Angeles that he
lied five times in sworn testimony and twice while testifying in a separate trial in Texas.
The story of Robert Durst is as much a string of mysteries stretching over four decades
as it is a story of wealth and privilege. His marriage to Kathie McCormack in 1973 had a
fairy-tale quality, her family said. She was from a lower middle-class family on Long Island.
He was the son of a wealthy New York family, who showed her exotic vacations and the best
tables at restaurants and discos.
But after he forced her to have an abortion, their marriage descended into bickering,
multiple affairs, pushing and violence.
After Ms. Durst disappeared, Mr. Durst said he had put her on a Manhattan-bound
train because she planned to attend a clinic rotation the next day. He waited until Friday to
report her missing at a police precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
An elevator operator at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan reported seeing Ms.
Durst; and a woman who identified herself as Ms. Durst — but who police came to believe
was Susan Berman — called Ms. Durst’s medical school to say that she was ill.
“It’s clear that Berman and Durst duped us,” the retired detective, Mr. Struk, said in an
interview. “I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
There was never a forensic search of the Dursts’ cottage in 1982, because the
investigation was centered in Manhattan, where Mr. Durst reported his wife missing.
The case against him in New York is circumstantial. There is no witness, no weapon
and no body. And Mr. Durst has acknowledged lying to police about his whereabouts at the
time his wife disappeared. “I wasn’t used to anyone questioning my veracity,” Mr. Durst told
The Jinx.

Text 2.
San Francisco Police Officer Charged with Shooting Man Who Died 3 Years Later
Officer Kenneth Cha, charged with voluntary manslaughter, “lacked a lawful basis to
even arrest” the man and “elevated a nonviolent encounter,” the district attorney said.
A San Francisco police officer was charged with voluntary manslaughter for shooting
an unarmed man who died three years after being wounded at his home in 2017, the San
Francisco district attorney’s office announced on Tuesday.
The officer, Kenneth Cha, was charged for shooting Sean Moore after he and his
partner, Officer Colin Patino, responded to a call that Mr. Moore was violating a restraining
order early on Jan. 6, 2017, according to the district attorney’s office. Mr. Moore died on Jan.
20, 2020, of what the coroner’s report said was “acute intestinal obstruction” because of bullet
wounds to his abdomen from the shooting.
In the statement, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Officer Cha “lacked a lawful
basis to even arrest” Mr. Moore and that he was unarmed at his home when he was shot by
Officer Cha.
“When officers inflict unwarranted violence in flagrant disregard of their training, it
denigrates the hard work of other police officers and shatters the trust our community places
in law enforcement,” Mr. Boudin said. “Rebuilding that trust requires us to hold those officers
who inflict unlawful violence accountable.”
The charges against Officer Cha include voluntary manslaughter, assault with a
semiautomatic firearm, enhancements for personal use of a firearm and infliction of great
bodily injury, the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement on Tuesday. It is
only the second time an on-duty law enforcement officer has been prosecuted for a homicide
in San Francisco, the office said. Officer Patino was not charged.
The statement said that Mr. Moore’s mother, Cleo Moore, said she was “very happy”
to learn of the charges against Officer Cha.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association did not immediately respond to a
request for comment on Tuesday. It was unclear on Tuesday night if Officer Cha had a
lawyer.
When Officer Cha and Officer Patino arrived at Mr. Moore’s door early in the
morning on Jan. 6, 2017, Mr. Moore asked them to leave and said he had not violated the
restraining order, which prohibited noise harassment, according to the district attorney’s
office. He told the officers that he had been sweeping his stairs and taking out his trash.
The officers did not leave, and what followed was a melee between the two officers
and Mr. Moore in which Officer Cha pepper-sprayed Mr. Moore and, accidentally, his own
partner, according to the district attorney’s office. Officer Patino later struck Mr. Moore with
his metal baton, and Mr. Moore struck back, causing Officer Patino to fall down some stairs.
Officer Cha then drew his gun as Mr. Moore kicked in his direction, and Officer Cha
shot him twice, according to the district attorney’s office.
“In just eight minutes, Officer Cha elevated a nonviolent encounter to one that took
Sean Moore’s life,” Mr. Boudin said.
Three different courts have previously held that Officer Cha and Officer Patino acted
unlawfully in using force against Mr. Moore.
In June, the city of San Francisco settled a lawsuit filed by Mr. Moore’s family for
$3.25 million that claimed civil rights violations and use of excessive force.
In a statement, Yoel Y. Haile, director of the criminal justice program for the A.C.L.U.
of Northern California, commended the district attorney’s office for its “continued effort to
hold police officers accountable for criminal behavior.”
“But Mr. Moore’s death is also a searing indictment of the entire carceral system, one
that responds to mental health disorders with criminalization and incarceration instead of with
treatment and compassion,” he said.

Text 3.
He Escaped Prison in 2015. Did He Kill a Young Mother Decades Before?
A bid to exonerate two men in a Buffalo-area murder centers on the possible role in
the crime of Richard Matt, a notorious New York killer.
TONAWANDA, N.Y. — In February 1993, Deborah Meindl walked into her house in
this working-class Buffalo suburb on a blustery Wednesday afternoon, and never left.
Police reports recount what happened: Ms. Meindl, a nursing student with two young
daughters, was stabbed dozens of times, her hands cuffed behind her back, and strangled with
a man’s tie that was left around her neck.
Suspicions quickly fell on her husband, who had spoken about having his wife killed,
according to court records. But the investigation soon pivoted to two petty thieves who were
later convicted of murder despite a lack of forensic evidence linking either to the crime.
Now, an explosive new claim is at the center of a renewed effort by defense lawyers to
clear the two: The real killer was one of New York’s most infamous criminals, Richard Matt,
whose 2015 escape from a state prison set off a nationwide manhunt that ended when he was
fatally shot by a federal agent.
The new theory emerged from a monthslong investigation by two prosecutors from the
Erie County, N.Y., district attorney’s office, who presented their findings — and their belief
in Mr. Matt’s involvement — to their boss, John J. Flynn, the district attorney, in August.
But Mr. Flynn rejected the findings, demoted one of the prosecutors and reassigned
the other. He said he could not comment on personnel issues, but said the two men had been
removed because they “did not accept my decision with the professionalism expected of
career prosecutors.” His office said that despite the lack of forensic evidence there was still
ample trial testimony to support the convictions.
Lawyers for the convicted men make another incendiary claim in court filings: Not
only did Mr. Matt kill Ms. Meindl; he may have carried out the murder at the behest of the
lead detective who investigated the crime, David Bentley.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bentley adamantly denied any role and offered to take a lie-detector
test.
“It’s totally, absolutely, unequivocally insane,” Mr. Bentley said, adding that he had
not known Ms. Meindl and had testified against Mr. Matt in a different murder case.
“I could never say that stuff,” Mr. Bentley said of his testimony in that case, “and have
hired him to murder somebody.”
In a motion filed in State Supreme Court in Buffalo last month, the defense lawyers
said there is evidence that Mr. Matt confessed to killing Ms. Meindl in 2015. He made the
confession to his fellow escapee, David Sweat, according to another document. Mr. Sweat is
imprisoned in Ulster County.
Adding more mystery to an already perplexing case, recent DNA sampling of crime
scene evidence has excluded both men convicted in the murder — and Mr. Matt.
On Wednesday, in a Buffalo courtroom, lawyers for the men convicted in the killing,
James Pugh and Brian Scott Lorenz, cited the DNA evidence, Mr. Bentley’s ties to Mr. Matt
and inconsistencies in prosecution witnesses’ accounts as reasons their clients should be
cleared.
Mr. Pugh, who was recently paroled after 25 years in prison, was there; Mr. Lorenz
appeared via video from the state prison in Auburn, N.Y., where he remains. Ms. Meindl’s
daughter, Lisa Payne, sat in the front row.
Justice Christopher J. Burns seemed inclined to favor a deep re-examination of the
case — “I’d like to get an answer to this,” he said — raised the prospect of an additional
hearing.
“I knew, in my heart, that I didn’t commit this crime,” Mr. Lorenz said in an interview
last month, adding, “But I never gave up.”
In a statement, Mr. Flynn, a Democrat, flatly denied that there was any credible
evidence “to link Richard Matt to the murder of Deborah Meindl.” He also defended his
response to the findings of the prosecutors who revisited the case.
“I, along with my entire senior leadership team, several of my senior bureau chiefs and
most experienced trial attorneys, disagreed with their conclusions due to a lack of any credible
evidence,” he said.
Because the two prosecutors have not detailed their findings publicly, it is not fully
clear what they believe implicates Mr. Matt. Neither man would comment, although one is
seeking to testify in the case, court filings show. Both still work for Mr. Flynn.
Mr. Bentley helped raise Mr. Matt’s daughter Jamie, who once wrote that the detective
“knew my father probably as well as anyone on the outside.” In an interview and text
messages, Mr. Bentley, who retired in 2003, acknowledged having had a close relationship
with Mr. Matt — whom he used as an informant — bordering on that of father-son.
“I related to Rick: I felt bad for him,” Mr. Bentley said. “You could almost say I loved
the kid.”
But he does not believe Mr. Matt — a convicted killer — could have murdered Ms.
Meindl, saying, “he was just a punk” and “wasn’t a candidate for a crime like that.”
“Somebody planted the idea about him just to defend Pugh and Lorenzo,” he said.
Mr. Bentley also suggested that Mr. Matt “was known to brag about all sorts of stuff
that never existed.”
After Ms. Meindl was killed, suspicion initially fell on her husband, Donald Meindl,
who was in his early 30s and a Taco Bell manager at the time. A friend told the police that
Mr. Meindl had once sought his advice about hiring someone to kill his wife. “It should be
made to look like a robbery,” the friend recalled Mr. Meindl saying, court records show.
Mr. Meindl, who did not respond to interview requests, insisted that he was joking and
has always maintained his innocence. Police and court records describe an open marriage and
Mr. Meindl’s involvement with a 17-year-old girl who worked for him. He had an alibi: The
day of the murder, he was at work getting fired for sexual harassment.
After a tip from an informant, investigators at the time shifted their focus to Mr.
Lorenz, a 23-year-old with a history of minor crimes who was in Iowa after being arrested for
car theft.
Desperate to return home, Mr. Lorenz concocted a bizarre plan to confess to Deborah
Meindl’s murder, according to his defense team, and implicated Mr. Pugh, his sometime
burglary partner, thinking it would bolster his story. He told a police officer he was innocent,
but was willing to plead guilty to a manslaughter charge, according to a prosecution filing.
Mr. Lorenz’s confession got details wrong — for instance, he said a hogtie was used
when one was not — and it was deemed inadmissible at trial. Still, the jury returned a guilty
verdict in less than six hours. (Mr. Lorenz’s name was listed as “Lorenzo” in court records
although his legal name is Lorenz.)
Mr. Pugh was in his 30s when the slaying occurred. “I was a criminal,” he said in an
interview. “But I certainly wasn’t somebody that would kill somebody. I’m not capable of
that.”
Mr. Lorenz, who is still in prison, recalled being incredulous at the verdict. “I can’t
believe, I can’t believe this,” he said in an interview. He added: “Anger turns into
bewilderment, then the depression sets in.”
Then in 2018 a state judge forced Erie County officials to conduct DNA testing of
blood-splattered items from the crime scene. Neither man’s DNA was found.
Mr. Lorenz was elated.
“I thought I was going home immediately,” he said.
Instead, earlier this year, Mr. Flynn’s office appointed two prosecutors to review the
case, Michael J. Hillery, who ran the office’s appeals bureau, and David A. Heraty, an
assistant district attorney.
After interviewing more than 50 witnesses, Mr. Hillery called Ilann Maazel, a civil
rights lawyer representing Mr. Lorenz, and told him that the prosecutors believed his client
was innocent. Moreover, they suspected Mr. Matt.
“I almost fell out of my chair,” Mr. Maazel said.
Mr. Pugh’s lawyer, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said he was “gratified that honest,
courageous prosecutors followed the evidence.”
In a court filing last month, Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers said Ms. Meindl had been having an
affair with Mr. Bentley and had become aware of unspecified acts of corruption by the
detective. The detective, the filing said, had “sent Matt to murder her to ensure that she would
not tell anyone else what she knew.”
During his career, Mr. Bentley was the subject of at least 15 police brutality and
harassment complaints, The Buffalo News has reported. But in interviews, he defended his
record, saying he was tough but never corrupt.
“I solved more crimes than the whole department did because I was savvy,” he said on
Tuesday. “But I was not crooked.”
He also insisted he had been not in a romantic relationship with Ms. Meindl, a denial
that Mr. Flynn echoed.
In a filing this week, Mr. Flynn’s office assailed Mr. Heraty, suggesting that he had
essentially fed details of the crime to Mr. Sweat, the onetime fugitive. Mr. Heraty has
declined to sign an affidavit agreeing to those findings, and has said he wants to testify in the
matter.
 On Wednesday, Mr. Maazel and Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma suggested than Mr. Sweat’s
testimony would most likely be included at any future hearing, possibly as soon as Dec. 13.
In a late September letter to Mr. Heraty that was turned over to the defense, Mr. Sweat
suggested that he could offer another plausible explanation to who had killed Deborah
Meindl.
“It’s been 6 ½ years since he told me and until you showed up it wasn’t real to me,”
Mr. Sweat wrote, adding that he was concerned about the prosecutor being removed from the
case and angry about “the two guys being in prison too who didn’t do it!”
“I hope,” he wrote, “someone is working on that.”

Text 4.
Supreme Court Rejects Inmate’s Plea for Firing Squad
The inmate, Ernest Johnson, argued that Missouri’s planned use of pentobarbital to
execute him would cause excruciating pain.
WASHINGTON — Over the dissents of its three liberal members, the Supreme Court
on Monday refused to hear an appeal from a death row inmate in Missouri who said the way
the state planned to execute him would cause him excruciating pain. The inmate, Ernest
Johnson, had asked to instead be put to death by a firing squad.
As is the court’s custom, it gave no reasons for refusing to hear the case. Mr. Johnson
was convicted of murdering three people during a 1994 robbery of a gas station. He later
learned he had a brain tumor and underwent surgery to address it, leaving him with a seizure
disorder.
Mr. Johnson sued to challenge Missouri’s execution protocol, which uses a lethal
injection of pentobarbital, saying it would very likely cause him to suffer intense and painful
seizures. As required by Supreme Court precedent, he proposed alternative methods of
execution, starting with nitrogen gas, a method contemplated by state law but never used.
In a separate case from Missouri in 2019, Bucklew v. Precythe, the Supreme Court
ruled that nitrogen gas was not a feasible alternative because it was, as Justice Neil M.
Gorsuch wrote for the majority, “an entirely new method — one that had never before been
used to carry out an execution and had no track record of successful use.”
But Justice Gorsuch wrote that other alternatives would remain available. “An inmate
seeking to identify an alternative method of execution is not limited to choosing among those
presently authorized by a particular state’s law,” he wrote.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said a firing squad may be one
such alternative, noting that a lawyer for the state had specifically raised the possibility when
the case was argued in 2018.
After the 2019 case was decided, Mr. Johnson sought to amend his lawsuit to ask for a
firing squad. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, denied
the request, saying it had come too late.
In dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Mr. Johnson’s appeal, Justice
Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the appeals court’s action was unfair and unseemly.
“Think about what the Eighth Circuit has done in the interest of moving things along
more quickly,” she wrote. “Johnson has plausibly pleaded that, if he is executed using
pentobarbital, he will experience pain akin to torture. Those factual allegations must be
accepted as true at this stage of the litigation.”
“Yet despite the risk of severe pain rising to the level of cruel and unusual
punishment,” she continued, “the Eighth Circuit has ensured that no court will ever review the
evidence in support of Johnson’s Eighth Amendment claim.”
“There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time,” Justice
Sotomayor wrote, quoting from her dissent in the 2019 decision. “The Eighth Amendment
sets forth one: We should not countenance the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment
simply for the sake of expediency. That is what the Eighth Circuit’s decision has done.
Because this court chooses to stand idly by, I respectfully dissent.”
Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the
case, Johnson v. Precythe, No. 20-287. In a second dissent, Justice Breyer, who has called for
the reconsideration of the constitutionality of the death penalty, said the new case provided
further evidence of how problematic capital punishment has become.
“I simply add,” Justice Breyer wrote, “that the difficulty of resolving this claim, 27
years after the murders, provides one more example of the special difficulties that the death
penalty, as currently administered, creates for the just application of the law.”

Text 5.
Missouri Executes Death Row Prisoner Despite Pleas from Pope and Others
Ernest L. Johnson, 61, was executed for killing three convenience store employees
during a 1994 robbery. Supporters, including Pope Francis, said his intellectual disabilities
made the execution unconstitutional.
A Missouri man convicted of beating three people to death during a 1994 convenience
store robbery was executed on Tuesday night despite calls for clemency from Pope Francis
and other supporters who said the man’s intellectual disabilities made the execution
unconstitutional.
Ernest Lee Johnson, who was on death row at a state prison in Bonne Terre, Mo., was
executed by lethal injection at 6:11 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to the Missouri
Department of Corrections.
In his last statement, which was released by the department, Mr. Johnson said he was
sorry and had remorse for what he did.
“I want to say that I love my family and friends,” he wrote, adding that he was
thankful for his lawyer. “For all the people that has prayed for me I thank them.”
In addition to the pope, those who called for clemency included two members of
Congress. They asked Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri to stop the execution, saying Mr.
Johnson should have been spared because he was intellectually disabled.
On Monday, the governor said in a statement that Mr. Johnson would be executed on
Tuesday as scheduled. “The state is prepared to deliver justice and carry out the lawful
sentence Mr. Johnson received in accordance with the Missouri Supreme Court’s order,” Mr.
Parson said.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request to stop the execution, which
went ahead as scheduled.
Mr. Johnson’s public defender, Jeremy Weis, said earlier that the Missouri Supreme
Court in August denied Mr. Johnson’s petition that he was ineligible for the death penalty
because he was intellectually disabled. The court also denied Mr. Johnson’s request to be
executed by firing squad, Mr. Weis said.
On Sept. 27, Francis appealed to Mr. Parson to spare Mr. Johnson’s life. On Friday,
Representatives Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II, both Democrats of Missouri, also asked
Mr. Parson, a Republican, to spare Mr. Johnson, saying that it would be unconstitutional to
execute him because of his intellectual disabilities.
The pope’s appeal was made in a letter to Mr. Parson from Archbishop Christophe
Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States. It came two years after Francis changed
church doctrine by declaring that executions were unacceptable in all cases because they are
“an attack” on human dignity.
In the letter, which was reported by Vatican News, Francis said his appeal was not
“based solely upon Mr. Johnson’s doubtful intellectual capacity.”
“His Holiness wishes to place before you the simple fact of Mr. Johnson’s humanity
and the sacredness of all human life,” Archbishop Pierre wrote.
 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled people is
a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The last time
Missouri carried out an execution was in May 2020, when Walter Barton was put to death by
lethal injection for fatally stabbing an 81-year-old woman in 1991.
Using a hammer as a weapon, Mr. Johnson killed three convenience store employees
— Mary Bratcher, 46; Fred Jones, 58; and Mabel Scruggs, 57 — in Columbia, Mo., in
February 1994 as he was robbing the store for money to buy drugs, court documents say. A
jury in Boone County, Mo., convicted him in 2005 on three counts of first-degree murder and
sentenced him to death, the documents say.
After several court challenges over the years centering on Mr. Johnson’s intellectual
tests and abilities, the state Supreme Court ruled in August that his recollections of details of
the crime showed he was able “to plan, strategize, and problem solve — contrary to a finding
of substantial subaverage intelligence.”
Mr. Johnson was born in Steele, Mo., in 1960 and grew up in Charleston, Mo., Ms.
Bush and Mr. Cleaver wrote in their letter. His father was a sharecropper, they said, and he
was raised primarily by his grandmother.
Because of his mother’s addictions to alcohol and drugs, Mr. Johnson was born with
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, Ms. Bush and Mr. Cleaver wrote. The Associated Press
reported that up to 20 percent of Mr. Johnson’s brain tissue was removed during an operation
in 2008 to remove a brain tumor.
“Mr. Johnson’s execution would be a grave act of injustice,” Ms. Bush and Mr.
Cleaver wrote.
In an opinion piece in The Kansas City Star on Sunday, Bob Holden, a Democratic
former governor of Missouri, said he had sent a letter to Mr. Parson seeking clemency for Mr.
Johnson. Mr. Holden said that he supported capital punishment, noting that 20 men were
executed during his tenure as governor, from 2001 to 2005.
“I also realize, however, there are unique occasions when the people of our state are
wisely served by the governor exercising the office’s clemency powers,” Mr. Holden wrote.
“The scheduled Oct. 5 execution of Ernest Johnson, I believe, is one such instance.”
Mr. Johnson, he wrote, had a “paper trail” of mental health professionals documenting
his intellectual disabilities. His brain development may have been stymied by fetal alcohol
spectrum disorder, Mr. Holden wrote, citing low I.Q. scores, adding that his communication
skills were “less than those of a typical 5-year-old.”
“None of this excuses what Johnson did,” Mr. Holden wrote. “But if our state is to be
guided by the rule of law, we must temper our understandable anger with reason and
compassion for the most vulnerable among us, including Ernest Johnson.”

Text 6.
Gunman Pleads Guilty in Parkland School Shooting
A jury in Florida will recommend whether he should be sentenced to life in prison or
death for the rampage that left 17 people dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The former student who waged a deadly attack
against his classmates and teachers in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 pleaded guilty on Wednesday to
the premeditated murder of 17 people and the attempted murder of 17 others, leaving his fate
— either spending his life in prison or facing execution — in the hands of a jury.
The 34 guilty pleas were enumerated in a somber courtroom filled with the families of
those who were killed and injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14,
2018. The community had braced for perhaps a monthslong trial but now soon faces what
could be a grisly penalty phase as the state seeks to put the former student, Nikolas Cruz, to
death.
Mr. Cruz, wearing a blue shirt under a black sweater vest, pleaded guilty after the
judge read a lengthy list of questions about whether he understood the gravity of his plea and
that it could lead to his death. He responded with “guilty” 34 times as Judge Elizabeth Scherer
read each charge — including each victim’s name — and asked how he wanted to plea.
The case next heads to a penalty phase, scheduled to begin on Jan. 4, in which a jury
will be selected and, after hearing testimony, will recommend a sentence to the judge.
At the hearing on Wednesday, a prosecutor laid out a chilling account of Mr. Cruz’s
crimes, describing his path down the school’s hallways as he searched for victims. In the
courtroom, relatives of the victims consoled each other as others breathed deeply or silently
wiped tears from their eyes.
Afterward, Mr. Cruz, 23, apologized to them as he hunched over a podium. Appearing
to read from a prepared statement, he said he had had trouble living with himself.
“I am very sorry for what I did, and I have to live with it every day,” he said to the
victims’ families, adding, “I love you, and I know you don’t believe me.”
Mr. Cruz suggested that drugs were the source of some of society’s ills. “I believe this
country would do better if everyone would stop smoking marijuana and doing all these drugs
and causing racism and violence out in the streets,” he said.
Armed with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle, Mr. Cruz, then 19, killed 14
students and three faculty members and injured 17 more people in one of the deadliest school
shootings in American history. “You’re all going to die,” Mr. Cruz said in one of three videos
he recorded on his cellphone before the shooting. Outraged Parkland students helped ignite a
national movement of young people against gun violence.
The Parkland case will be the rare instance of a mass shooter who lives to see any sort
of trial, since many of them end up dying in their attacks. The white supremacist who killed
nine members of a Black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 was tried in federal court, found
guilty and sentenced to death. The gunman who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora,
Colo., in 2012 pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in state court, was found guilty and
sentenced to life.
From the start, Mr. Cruz’s lawyers said he would agree to plead guilty in exchange for
life imprisonment. But the top prosecutor in Broward County at the time of the attack,
Michael J. Satz, said he would pursue the death penalty. Mr. Satz’s term as state attorney has
since ended, but he is still leading the case.
Defense lawyers did not discuss the reason for the decision to enter a guilty plea
despite the risk of execution, but legal analysts said it could provide advantages. Once a
defense lawyer has determined that a guilty verdict is unavoidable, arguing otherwise might
only burn good will with jurors, said William N. Nettles, a former United States attorney in
South Carolina.
“In cases like that, it’s often the best course of action to decline to fight a losing battle
and instead fight a battle that you might win — and that’s the sentencing battle,” he said.
During sentencing, the defense can present mitigating evidence that would not
typically be admissible during the guilt phase, such as background about the defendant’s
childhood or “anything they can do to inject to the jury something humanizing,” said George
Brauchler, a former district attorney in Colorado who prosecuted the gunman in the Aurora
shooting.
“We get to go to a jury and say, ‘Our client did wrong, and he admits he did wrong,
but this young man is redeemable at some level, even though he doesn’t deserve to take a free
breath again,’” he said.
In Florida, judges can sentence a defendant to death only if a jury unanimously
recommends the death penalty, and even then, judges can override the jury and sentence a
defendant to life in prison, though they rarely do so. If even one juror does not vote for the
death penalty, Mr. Cruz will be spared execution. Judge Scherer will continue to oversee the
proceedings in the penalty phase.
There are 305 people on death row in Florida; the state executed an average of three
people each year from 2010 through 2019.
 Last week, Mr. Cruz pleaded guilty to battery and other charges in a separate case
related to a jailhouse fight with a sheriff’s deputy that was supposed to go to trial this week.
The judge scheduled Wednesday’s hearing on the shooting case in a larger courtroom to
accommodate victims’ families, a gaggle of reporters and a livestream on Court TV.
Some victims’ families attended court for the first time to hear Mr. Cruz declare
himself guilty. Among them were Tony and Jennifer Montalto, the parents of Gina Montalto,
who was a 14-year-old freshman at Stoneman Douglas. At one point during the hearing, Mr.
Montalto comforted Ms. Montalto as she dabbed her eyes.
After the hearing, Mr. Montalto called the guilty plea an important step, even if “for
our family, nothing has changed.”
Mr. Montalto said he favored a death sentence in the case.
“We have to, as a society, find a way to punish them to the maximum extent of the
law” to try to deter others from committing similar attacks, he said.
Gena and Thomas Hoyer, whose 15-year-old son, Luke, was among Mr. Cruz’s
victims, also attended the hearing and said they found Mr. Cruz’s statement to be “self-
centered.” They said it had not swayed their belief that he should be executed.
“He got to accomplish his goal of killing people,” Ms. Hoyer said. “And it is my
biggest wish that he cannot complete his second goal of avoiding the death penalty.”
Mr. Cruz had a history of mental health and behavior problems, many of them
documented by the public school district. Victims’ families recently reached a $25 million
settlement with Broward County Public Schools over the shooting.
The money will go to the 17 families who lost loved ones, 16 of those who were
injured and 19 survivors who suffer from post-traumatic stress or other conditions, according
to David Brill, who represents four of the victims’ families and one of the injured.
“Our beautiful, beloved and bubbly daughter is gone, and this murderer enjoys the
blessings of life in prison,” he said. “We heard a ridiculous statement by the murderer, and we
need to remember that we have to stop glorifying the people who commit these heinous acts.”

Text 7.
After Supreme Court Lifts Stay, Oklahoma Executes Inmate
The prisoner, John Marion Grant, convulsed and vomited as he was put to death by
lethal injection. The court also cleared the way for another execution next month.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday lifted a stay of execution that a
federal appeals court had granted to two Oklahoma death row inmates, clearing the way for
the men to be put to death by lethal injection.
One of them, John Marion Grant, who was convicted of murdering a prison cafeteria
worker in 1998, was executed on Thursday, a few hours after the Supreme Court ruled.
Like other executions in the state, this one — the first in six years — did not go
smoothly, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Grant, who was strapped to a gurney,
convulsed and vomited as the first chemical, a sedative, was administered. After several
minutes of this, members of the execution team wiped vomit from his face and neck.
The Oklahoma Department of Corrections said the execution was carried out in
accordance with protocols and “without complication.”
Mr. Grant and the other inmate, Julius Jones, had argued that the state’s lethal
injection protocol, which uses three chemicals, could subject them to excruciating pain.
They also objected on religious grounds to a requirement imposed by a trial judge that
they choose among proposed alternative methods of execution, saying that doing so would
amount to suicide.
As is the court’s custom, its brief order gave no reasons. The three more liberal
members of the court — Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan —
dissented, also without providing reasons. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch did not participate in the
case, presumably because he had considered an aspect of it when he was a federal appeals
court judge.
Mr. Jones, who was convicted of killing a man in 1999 in front of the man’s sister and
daughters during a carjacking, is set to be put to death on Nov. 18.
The Supreme Court has been skeptical of challenges to lethal injection protocols and
requires inmates to demonstrate that they would be subjected to “a substantial risk of severe
pain.” Inmates challenging a protocol must also propose an alternative.
“A prisoner must show a feasible and readily implemented alternative method of
execution that would significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain and that the state
has refused to adopt without a legitimate penological reason,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in 2019,
summarizing earlier decisions.
The two inmates proposed four alternatives but declined to choose among them on
religious grounds. That failure caused Judge Stephen P. Friot, of the Federal District Court in
Oklahoma, to remove them from a lawsuit brought by several inmates challenging the
protocol.
A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit
granted a stay of execution to Mr. Grant and Mr. Jones, saying they were not required to
“check a box” choosing how they were to die.
“We find nothing in the relevant case law that specifically requires a prisoner to
designate a method of execution to be used in his case by ‘checking a box’ when the prisoner
has already identified in his complaint the very same alternative methods given as choices on
the form,” the majority wrote in an unsigned order.
In dissent, Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich wrote that inmates must do more than
propose “a conditional, hypothetical or abstract designation.” An inmate must, he wrote,
“designate an alternative method that can be used in his case.”
Calling the appeals court’s decision a “grievous error,” John M. O’Connor,
Oklahoma’s attorney general, filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to lift
the stay.
In opposing that request, the inmates’ lawyers wrote that Judge Friot had drawn an
improper distinction between prisoners willing to choose a particular alternative method of
execution and those who would not.
Oklahoma has a history of botched executions.
In 2014, Clayton D. Lockett appeared to moan and struggle during an execution that
took 43 minutes. Doctors concluded that Mr. Lockett had not been fully sedated.
In 2015, Charles F. Warner underwent an 18-minute execution in which officials
mistakenly used the wrong drug to stop his heart. Later that year, Richard E. Glossip, a death
row inmate who challenged the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol
before the Supreme Court, was granted a stay of execution after the state’s supplier of lethal
injection drugs sent prison officials the wrong drug.
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about a Texas inmate’s request
that his pastor be able to touch and pray aloud with him in the death chamber.

Text 8.
Rancor and Raw Emotion Surface in Supreme Court Death Penalty Ruling
WASHINGTON — In a 5-to-4 decision that revealed fault lines and considerable
friction over the use of the death penalty, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a death
row inmate in Missouri may be executed by lethal injection notwithstanding a rare medical
condition that he says will cause excruciating pain. The majority accused the inmate of
gamesmanship and delay.
The decision made clear that feelings are still raw at the court over its 5-to-4 decision
in February to allow the execution of a Muslim inmate in Alabama after his request to have
his imam be present was denied, with the majority saying he should have asked sooner. Last
week, the court stayed the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas in similar circumstances,
over two noted dissents, with the majority apparently satisfied that the request had been
timely.
On Monday, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the Missouri
inmate, Russell Bucklew, had waited too long to object to the way the state planned to
execute him. “Courts should police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as tools
to interpose unjustified delay,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
He added that the dissenting justices were “seeking to relitigate” the February decision
concerning the Muslim inmate in Alabama.
In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer set out what he said was the larger dispute,
stemming from the Alabama case and carrying into the one decided Monday.
“The prisoner’s claim — that prisoners of some faiths were entitled to have a minister
present at their executions while prisoners of other faiths were not — raised a serious
constitutional question,” Justice Breyer wrote. “And therein lies the problem. It might be
possible to end delays by limiting constitutional protections for prisoners on death row. But to
do so would require us to pay too high a constitutional price.”
Mr. Bucklew, the Missouri inmate, was convicted of murdering a man who had been
seeing his former girlfriend, and of kidnapping and raping her. His lawyers said his condition,
cavernous hemangioma, would make him choke on his own blood during his execution.
Justice Gorsuch wrote that the Constitution authorizes capital punishment and that
states must be able to use it without undue delays. He added that the Eighth Amendment’s
prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment bars only needless pain.
“The Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something
that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes,” he
wrote.
Justice Gorsuch wrote that Mr. Bucklew was required to propose a less painful method
of execution but had failed to do so. He added that inmates litigating in good faith should be
able to overcome that requirement.
“We see little likelihood that an inmate facing a serious risk of pain will be unable to
identify an available alternative — assuming, of course, that the inmate is more interested in
avoiding unnecessary pain than in delaying his execution,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr.
and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion.
Last year, five justices voted to stay Mr. Bucklew’s execution, with Justice Anthony
M. Kennedy joining the four more liberal justices to form a majority. Justice Kennedy retired
last summer, and Monday’s decision suggested that his replacement by Justice Kavanaugh
will harden divisions on the court over capital punishment.
Earlier Supreme Court decisions have required inmates challenging lethal injection
protocols to identify available and preferable methods of execution.
“A prisoner must show a feasible and readily implemented alternative method of
execution that would significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain and that the state
has refused to adopt without a legitimate penological reason,” Justice Gorsuch wrote,
summarizing the earlier decisions.
Mr. Bucklew argued that the requirement should not apply to people with rare medical
conditions, but he did propose that nitrogen gas would be preferable.
Justice Gorsuch rejected that alternative. Nitrogen gas, he wrote, is not authorized by
Missouri law and had never been used to carry out an execution in the United States. In
dissent, Justice Breyer said that three states have authorized the use of nitrogen gas in
executions.
Justice Gorsuch wrote that Mr. Bucklew had also not proved he would suffer less pain
from nitrogen gas.
 In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that the court had made things too
complicated. The Eighth Amendment bars only the deliberate infliction of pain, he wrote, and
there was no evidence that Missouri had designed its lethal injection protocol to hurt Mr.
Bucklew.
In dissent, Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor
and Elena Kagan, wrote that Mr. Bucklew may face an “excruciating and grotesque”
punishment.
“Bucklew cites evidence,” Justice Breyer wrote, “that executing him by lethal
injection will cause the tumors that grow in his throat to rupture during his execution, causing
him to sputter, choke and suffocate on his own blood for up to several minutes before he
dies.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the majority’s emphasis on
addressing delays in carrying out death sentences.
“There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time,” she wrote. “If a
death sentence or the manner in which it is carried out violates the Constitution, that stain can
never come out. Our jurisprudence must remain one of vigilance and care, not one of
dismissiveness.”

Text 9.
Texas Nurse Sentenced to Death for Fatally Injecting 4 Heart Patients with Air
William Davis, who worked at Christus Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas, was
convicted of capital murder on Oct. 19. His sentence will automatically be appealed.
A former Texas nurse was sentenced to death this week for injecting air into the
arteries of four patients recovering from heart surgery, causing fatal brain damage, a court
official said.
A jury in Tyler, Texas, handed up the sentence on Wednesday in the capital murder
case of the former nurse, William Davis, eight days after convicting him.
Prosecutors said during the trial’s sentencing phase that Mr. Davis, 37, had harmed at
least 11 patients altogether by injecting air into their arterial lines or venous systems.
Two of those other patients later died, according to prosecutors, but charges were not
brought because the cases would have been harder to prove.
In making their case for the death penalty, prosecutors had played a recording of a
jailhouse phone conversation in which Mr. Davis told his ex-wife that he wanted to prolong
the I.C.U. stays of the patients so that he could accrue overtime. Their deaths, Mr. Davis said
on the call, were accidental.
Jacob Putman, the district attorney for Smith County, rejected that explanation during
a news conference on Wednesday.
“Even if that were true and that he somehow was trying to prolong their illness, for
someone to do that — kill their patient and then try again,” he said, “you have to be the kind
of person who has no empathy, who does not care for another person, who is unconcerned
with their well being, who feels no guilt.”
Mr. Davis was working for Christus Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler at the time that
the four patients named in the case experienced complications after heart surgery in 2017 and
2018. He was fired about a month before his arrest in April 2018. Tyler is about 100 miles
east of Dallas.
A lawyer for Mr. Davis, who lives in Hallsville, Texas, did not immediately respond to
a request for comment on Thursday.
Mr. Davis’s death sentence is subject to an automatic appeal, Kaylee Hahn, an
administrator for the 114th District Court, said in an email on Thursday.
During the trial, prosecutors presented a portrait of Mr. Davis as a sadistic caregiver
who slipped into patients’ rooms when no one was watching and “enjoyed” injecting air into
their arterial lines, which caused fatal brain damage.
 Doctors were at a loss to explain what could have gone wrong until, the authorities
said, they saw CT scans that showed air in the patients’ brains. During the trial, prosecutors
played security camera footage showing Mr. Davis entering the room of one of the patients.
Three minutes later, the patient’s heart monitor alarm sounded. He later died.
“There’s no way this could be accidental,” Mr. Putman said at the news conference.
“The evidence is overwhelming. The only conclusion you can come to is someone who would
do something like this would have to be cold and callous and unfeeling. He has no love for
anyone but himself. What he’s done to these families didn’t faze him at all.”
The victims who died after air had been injected into their arterial lines were: Ronald
Clark, 68; Christopher Greenaway, 47; Joseph Kalina, 58; and John Lafferty, 74.
Mr. Putman said that prosecutors and the police wouldn’t have been able to build a
case against Mr. Davis without the hospital’s cooperation.
A spokesman for Christus Mother Frances Hospital said in an email statement on
Thursday that many people suffered as a result of Mr. Davis’s actions.
“We hope the court’s decision and the conclusion of this trial will bring some peace to
the families of the victims and to the victims who were irreparably harmed by Will Davis,”
the spokesman said. “We will continue to pray for the peace and healing of the families, our
associates and community, and all involved.”
Prosecutors pointed out that an average appeal in death penalty cases in Texas could
take 10 to 12 years by the time it is decided by state and federal courts. They acknowledged
that there could be additional victims, though they said it would be difficult to investigate
because of the passage of time.
“I don’t doubt,” Mr. Putman said, “that there were more before that.”

Text 10.
Rodney Reed Should Not Be Retried in Texas Murder Case, Judge Says
The judge said that new evidence, including witness testimony, was not sufficient to
warrant a new trial for Mr. Reed, who was sentenced to death in the 1996 murder of a 19-
year-old woman.
A judge in Texas has recommended that Rodney Reed, a death row prisoner whose
case has drawn the attention of celebrities and elected officials, should not receive a new trial
in the 1996 murder of a 19-year-old woman.
Judge J.D. Langley, who filed his recommendation on Sunday in District Court in
Bastrop County, said that Mr. Reed “has not proven by clear and convincing evidence that he
is actually innocent.”
Judge Langley’s recommendation sends the case back to the state’s highest criminal
court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which will decide if Mr. Reed will get a new
trial. His lawyers said they were hopeful the court would grant one, though it was not clear
when that would be decided.
Mr. Reed, 53, who has long claimed his innocence, was convicted in 1998 in the 1996
murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop, Texas. Ms. Stites, 19, was strangled, and her body was
dumped alongside a rural road. Prosecutors said she had also been raped, and Mr. Reed was
arrested based mostly on DNA tests.
Mr. Reed has said that he and Ms. Stites were having an affair, which would explain
why his DNA was recovered from her body. Mr. Reed’s lawyers say witnesses have
corroborated that the two were having an affair.
His lawyers said that new evidence had surfaced in recent years, including testimony
from witnesses who had come forward pointing toward the victim’s fiancé as another suspect.
One of Mr. Reed’s lawyers, Jane Pucher of the Innocence Project, which seeks to
exonerate people who might have been wrongly convicted, said in an interview on Monday
that her team had presented “numerous witnesses who had absolutely no motive to lie or
misremember or exaggerate anything in Rodney’s favor.”
 “If a new jury heard the overwhelming evidence of Rodney Reed’s innocence, it
would have reasonable doubts,” Ms. Pucher said in a statement. “Convicted by an all-white
jury, Mr. Reed has spent 23 years on death row for a crime he did not commit.”
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, commended the judge’s recommendation that
Mr. Reed be denied a new trial.
“Rodney Reed sexually assaulted and murdered Stacey Stites,” Mr. Paxton said in a
statement on Tuesday. “The state’s evidence was held to be credible, while deciding that
Reed’s defensive theory of a consensual affair lacked any credibility.”
The case has captured the attention of celebrities like Rihanna and Kim Kardashian
West. Several Democratic and Republican elected officials have asked the state to intervene
and call off the execution.
Mr. Reed, who is one of 197 inmates on Texas’ death row, has tried and failed several
times to get his conviction overturned, court records show. His execution has been stayed
twice, most recently in November 2019, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
suspended his death sentence and ordered the court where he was originally tried to consider
the new evidence in his case.
Ms. Pucher said witnesses have testified that “Ms. Stites’s fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, was
violent and controlling and had threatened to hurt her if he discovered she was unfaithful.”
Mr. Fennell, a former police officer, pleaded guilty in 2008 to kidnapping a woman. The
woman said he also sexually assaulted her, according to the Innocence Project.
Arthur J. Snow Jr., who served time in prison with Mr. Fennell, said in a sworn
affidavit in 2019 that he heard Mr. Fennell confess that he killed Ms. Stites because she had
cheated on him with a Black man. Mr. Reed is Black.
Mr. Fennell was released from prison in 2018. His lawyer, Robert M. Phillips, has said
that Mr. Fennell denies killing Ms. Stites. Mr. Fennell could not be reached for comment on
Monday.
Judge Langley wrote in his 50-page recommendation that he found Mr. Fennell’s
testimony that he and Ms. Stites “were happy together” to be credible.
The Innocence Project said that Mr. Fennell was not credible when he testified that the
more than 20 witnesses who had implicated him in Ms. Stites’s murder were “lying.”
“Mr. Fennell was an early suspect in the case, his statements to police were misleading
and he was found to be deceptive on two polygraph tests,” the Innocence Project said in a
statement.
the High Court in England and Wales, to the Court of Session in Scotland, and to the Court
of Appeal in Northern Ireland.
The Independent Council on tribunals appointed by the Lord Chancellor and the Lord
Advocate, supervises many tribunals, advises on draft legislation and rules of procedure, monitors
their activities and reports on particular matters. A Scottish Committee of the Council
exercises similar functions in Scotland.

Ex. 16. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Text 1. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Злочинність
Злочинність - найнебезпечніший прояв поведінки, що відхиляється, яка
наносить найбільший збиток суспільству. Слово "злочинність" похідне від слова
"злочин", що в українській мові завжди означало "беззаконня", "злодіяння". Злочин - це
зазіхаюче на правопорядок суспільно небезпечне діяння, передбачене кримінальним
кодексом.
Сукупність злочинів, здійснюваних у даному суспільстві й у даний період часу,
позначається поняттям "злочинність". Злочинність - це не просто сума злочинів, але
масове явище, що має закономірності свого існування і розвитку, причини, умови,
сприятливі їм. Це явище соціальне, тому що корениться в надрах суспільних відносин,
відбиває особливості соціального життя, виступає як крайнє вираження протиріч і
недоліків розвитку суспільства. Воно викликає важкі наслідки для суспільства і його
членів як ні одне з інших негативних явищ суспільного розвитку.
Злочинність не тільки соціальне, але і правове явище, тому що злочинне лише
те, що закріплено в карному законі. Злочинність містить у собі дії, що зазіхають на
особистість, на власність, права і свободи громадян, на суспільні відносини. Ці дії
заподіюють об'єкту зазіхання реальну і дуже істотну шкоду.
Особливість злочинності: наявність певного контингенту осіб -злочинців, для
яких злочинна діяльність стала професійною.
Види злочинів, що передбачаються кримінальними кодексами різних країн,
дуже різноманітні. Переважають дві групи, що є у всіх країнах: корисливі злочини
(розкрадання, крадіжки, шахрайство, хабарі тощо), насильницькі, агресивні злочини
(убивства, тілесні ушкодження, зґвалтування тощо).
Ці види злочинів складають від 75 до 90% усіх навмисних злочинів. Усе більше
поширення у світі одержують економічні злочини, що зазіхають на інтереси споживачів
і завдають шкоди навколишньому середовищу, місцевий і міжнародний тероризм, що
включає захоплення заручників і знищення державної власності. Існують прояви
расової дискримінації, катування, викрадення людей і масових убивств.

Text 2. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Крадіжка та відповідальність за неї

Необхідно знати відмінності між дрібною крадіжкою, яка вважається

адміністративним правопорушенням і крадіжкою, яка тягне кримінальне покарання.
Ст. 51 Кодексу про адміністративні правопорушення містить поняття дрібної
крадіжки – викрадення чужого майна шляхом крадіжки, шахрайства, привласнення чи
розтрати.
Вчинення дрібної крадіжки тягне за собою наступне покарання:
◦штраф від 170 грн. до 510 грн., або виправні роботи (у такому разі, у
правопорушника примусово відраховується 1/5 його заробітку (20%) за його місцем
роботи). Також може бути призначений (присуджений) адміністративний арешт, тобто
примусове поміщення в ізолятор тимчасового утримання (або в іншу установу, за
рішенням органів внутрішніх справ (міліції). Термін від 5 до 10 діб. Адміністративний
арешт може призначатися тільки судом.
Якщо людина скоїла дрібну крадіжку, понесла адміністративне покарання і на
протязі року здійснила її знову покарання буде наступним:
◦ штраф від 510 грн. до 850 грн., або виправні роботи на строк від
одного до двох місяців (з відрахуванням 20% від заробітку), або адміністративний
арешт (термін від 10 до 15 діб).
 Крадіжка вважається дрібною, якщо вартість майна (речі) не перевищує 121
гривні.
Також існує кримінальна відповідальність за крадіжку (таємне викрадення
чужого майна (речі)). Ст. 185 Кримінального кодексу передбачає покарання.
1 штраф від 850 грн. до 1700 грн.;
2 громадські роботи (безоплатне виконання суспільно корисних
робіт, у вільний від роботи чи навчання час) на термін від 80 до 240 годин (не більше 4
годин на день);
3 виправні роботи на строк від 6 місяців до 2-ох років (за місцем
роботи з примусовим відрахуванням 1/5 його заробітку (20%) державі);
4 арешт на строк від 1 до 6 місяців;
5 позбавлення волі (виправна колонія, в’язниця) на термін від 1 до 3
років.
Крадіжка вчинена повторно або за попередньою змовою групою осіб (тобто
злочин скоюється декількома (два і більше) людьми, які домовилися до початку
злочину про його вчинення):
1 арешт на строк від 3 до 6 місяців;
2 обмеження волі на строк від 1 до 5 років;
3 позбавлення волі на строк від 1 до 5 років.
Крадіжка майна, якщо вона сталася в результаті проникнення в житло, або інше
приміщення або склад, а також крадіжка, в результаті якої було завдано значної шкоди
(збитки) потерпілому (збитки від 1700 до 4250 грн.) Карається позбавленням волі на
строк від 3 до 6 років.
Крадіжка, вчинена у великих масштабах(більше 152 тисяч 250 грн.) Карається
позбавленням волі на строк від 5 до 8 років.
Крадіжка вчинена в особливо великих розмірах (масштабах), що перевищують
365 000 400 грн.) або організованою групою (стійким об’єднанням, де є організатор,
пособник, виконавець) карається позбавленням волі на строк від 7 до 12 років з
конфіскацією (примусовим вилученням) майна злочинця.

Text 3. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Право на життя як само собою зрозуміле мається на увазі і прямо ніде не

зафіксоване. Загальновизнано, що в Конституції містяться найважливіші його гарантії:
заборони позбавляти кого б то не було життя без «належної правової процедури», а
також застосовувати «жорстокі і незвичайні покарання» (поправки V, VIII, XIV).
Смертна кара з самого початку існування США як держави передбачалася
федеральними законами і законодавством штатів за найбільш небезпечні злочини проти
життя і держави. Її застосування, таким чином, спочатку не розглядалося як порушення
права на життя. Про це, зокрема, свідчить згадка про страти і про «позбавлення життя»
в V і XIV поправках до Конституції. У XX столітті, особливо після Другої світової
війни, в США, як і в багатьох інших країнах, активізувався рух за скасування смертної
кари.
У даний час смертна кара передбачена законодавством Союзу, а також 36
штатами за приблизно 70 складів злочинів (вбивство, державна зрада, шпигунство,
лінчування, пограбування тощо). Федеральне законодавство США передбачає смертну
кару за кілька видів найбільш тяжких державних, військових і загальнокримінальних
злочинів. У 1988 р. актом Конгресу до їх числа додано вбивство федерального
службовця, вчинене торгівцями наркотиками.

Text 4. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Свобода слова є первинним, основоположним правом, а найважливішими,

найбільш ефективними формами її існування виступають також сформульовані в I
поправці свобода друку, зборів, петицій. Сучасне розуміння свободи слова і друку
передбачає вільний виступ не тільки в друкованих, але і в електронних засобах масової
інформації.
Найважливішою гарантією свободи слова і друку є відсутність попередньої
цензури. В 1931 р. у рішенні по справі Ніар проти Міннесоти Верховний суд
постановив, що свобода друку (включаючи радіомовлення) не повинна обмежуватися
жодною попередньою цензурою. Суд зробив виняток, допустивши попередню цензуру
лише щодо матеріалів, у яких повідомляються відомості, що становлять державну
таємницю, публікуються «непристойності»; міститься підбурювання до насильства або
повалення уряду, порушується недоторканність приватного життя, а також міститься
інформація про справу, по якій не закінчено судовий розгляд.
Зі свободою слова тісно взаємопов'язані інші інформаційні свободи, які отримали
в останні десятиліття розвиток у законодавстві США. Акт про свободу інформації 1996
р. встановив правило, згідно з яким усі особи, які бажають отримати інформацію з
федеральних державних установ (і їх архівів), можуть офіційно її вимагати. Даному
праву відповідає обов'язок посадових осіб безперешкодно надати громадянину
відомості, що його цікавлять, якщо вони не входять в число встановлених законом
винятків: персональних, медичних та інших особистих досьє, відомостей, мають
державну або комерційну таємницю тощо.

Text 5. Read the text. Write a summary in English.

Важливими формами здійснення свободи слова відповідно до I поправки є

свобода мирних зібрань та петицій. Перша включає право громадян на проведення
зборів у будь-якій формі: мітингів, демонстрацій, маніфестацій, демонстрацій тощо.
Оскільки здійснення перерахованих заходів збільшує вірогідність вчинення дій, що
порушують громадський спокій або громадський порядок, процедура реалізації
свободи зібрань регламентується більш докладно, ніж свобода друку або петицій.
У 1941 р. у рішенні по справі Кокс проти Нью-Гемпширу Верховний суд вказав,
що з метою охорони громадського порядку законодавець вправі регламентувати час,
місце, порядок проведення демонстрацій і мітингів у громадських місцях. Така
регламентація здійснюється законодавством штатів. Головними умовами проведення
зазначених публічних акцій є їх мирний характер, дозвіл власника землі, на території
якої планується мітинг, хода або збори, а також повідомлення місцевої влади, які
можуть обмежити свободу зібрань (змінивши місце, час проведення, взагалі
скасувавши відповідний захід), щоб уникнути порушення нормального дорожнього
руху, проведення в одному районі двох мітингів чи демонстрацій одночасно, небезпеки
блокування входу до приміщень і виходу з них. Закони багатьох штатів забороняють
проводити названі заходи поблизу будівель судів, місць позбавлення свободи і
військових об'єктів з тим, щоб уникнути їх політизації.