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THE 1980s: LAW AND JUSTICE: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In January 1987 Hector Escudero Aponte, a maintenance worker at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was arraigned on ninety-six counts of murder as the result of a deadly fire at the hotel. The fire was apparently started as the result of an ongoing labor dispute. On 22 June 1987 Aponte and two accomplices were sentenced to terms ranging from seventy-five to ninety-nine years in prison for these homicides.

In October 1989 televangelist Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in federal district court in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In November 1984 Margie Velma Barfield became the first woman put to death in the United States in twenty-two years. She had been convicted of murdering her fiancé and three other people, including her mother.

In August 1988 U.S. Rep. Mario Biaggi of New York was found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy, and extortion in what had become known as the Wedtech scandal. Biaggi had received Wedtech stock worth about __BODY__.8 million in return for lobbying on the company's behalf.

In June 1986 star basketball player Len Bias, who had recently been drafted by the world champion Boston Celtics, collapsed and died in his dormitory in College Park, Maryland, as the result of a physical condition brought on by the use of cocaine.

In June 1981 former Tennessee governor Ray Blanton was found guilty of extortion, conspiracy, and mail fraud for accepting over $23,000 in bribes in a plan to sell liquor licenses to friends.

In August 1981 Christopher John Boyce, a convicted spy and prison escapee, was captured near Seattle, Washington, after a nineteen-month manhunt.

In June 1986 President Ronald Reagan announced that Chief Justice Warren Burger would be retiring from the Supreme Court, which he had served on for the previous seventeen years.

In June 1981 former secretary of agriculture Earl Butz was sentenced to thirty days in jail and a $10,000 fine for filing a false federal income tax return.

In December 1985 Paul Castellano, age seventy and reputed to be one of the main leaders of organized crime in the United States, was shot to death in New York City. He and an associate were slain as they were preparing to enter a restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

In March 1988 Robert Chambers Jr., who had been charged in the death of Jennifer Levin in New York City, changed his plea during the ninth day of jury deliberations and pleaded guilty to first-degree man-slaughter. He admitted that he had intended to injure Levin and had caused her death during what was termed "rough sex." Under the plea-bargain arrangement, he would serve at least five years in prison.

In March 1981 Joseph William Coyle, age twenty-six, was arrested at New York's Kennedy Airport for stealing money that had fallen from an armored truck a week before. The amount that fell off of the truck was __BODY__.2 million dollars.

In July 1980 Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, the drug-rehabilitation organization, and two of its members pleaded no contest to charges that they had conspired to commit murder by planting a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued Synanon on behalf of former members of the group who had contended that they were kept in the group against their will.

In August 1984 John DeLorean, developer of the DeLorean automobile, was found not guilty of charges that he conspired to distribute cocaine worth $24 million dollars. Some jurors later stated that they felt he had been entrapped by government agents disguised as drug dealers during a period when he was trying to save his failing automobile company in Ireland.

In April 1985 convicted rapist Gary Dodson was briefly freed on bail from his twenty-five-to-fifty-year sentence when his accuser recanted her testimony. His accuser, Kathleen Webb, stated in an affidavit that she had made up the story in 1977 because she had become pregnant by her boyfriend at the time. She claimed to have simply picked Dodson's photograph from a file of mug shots. The judge chose not to believe Webb and sent Dodson back to jail; however, he was later freed when the governor of Illinois commuted his sentence on 12 May.

In December 1980 Bernadette Dohrn, age thirty-eight, surrendered to authorities ten years after going under-ground to escape riot charges resulting from Chicago's "Days of Rage" demonstration in 1969. She received three years probation and a __BODY__,500 fine.

In August 1987 thirty-five-year-old hospital worker Donald Harvey pleaded guilty to killing twenty-four people by poisoning, twenty-one of them at the Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Middletown, Ohio. An investigation occurred when an autopsy showed that one patient died of a lethal dose of cyanide. Harvey was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison.

In July 1981 Joseph George Helmich was arrested by the FBI and charged with selling sophisticated encoding equipment to Soviet officials.

In April 1981 former Yippie and counterculture leader Abbie Hoffman was sentenced to up to three years in prison for selling $36,000 in cocaine to undercover policemen in 1973. He surrendered in 1980 after spending six years underground.

In August 1986 the Soviet press agency TASS reported that former CIA agent Edward Howard had been granted political asylum in the Soviet Union. Howard had been dismissed from the CIA in 1983 after failing a lie-detector test.

In May 1980 White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan was cleared of cocaine-use charges when a special grand jury concluded that there was insufficient evidence to sustain an indictment.

In May 1980 Vernon Jordan Jr., president of the National Urban League and a respected black civil rights leader, was shot and critically injured but survived an assassination attempt in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In April 1980 former United States budget director Bert Lance was acquitted after a sixteen-week trial of nine counts of bank fraud.

In May 1987 Hollywood director John Landis and four others were found not guilty of criminal charges resulting from the deaths in 1982 of actor Vic Morrow and two children during the filming of the movie "Twilight Zone." The deaths occurred when an explosive caused the crash of a helicopter, which struck and killed the three people.

In December 1988 perennial fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud. He and six others were found guilty of charges related to improper solicitation of loans by his organization. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

In December 1983 former EPA official Rita Lavelle was found guilty of committing perjury and of obstructing a congressional investigation regarding her knowledge that a former employer had dumped hazardous waste at a California disposal site.

In December 1980 John Lennon, a founding member of the Beatles, was shot dead outside his New York apartment by Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan.

In March 1980 former U.S. representative Aliarci Lowenstein was shot and killed in his New York City law office. He had been the main architect of the 1968 antiwar movement to block the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson for a second term. The gunman was later identified as Dennis Sweeney, a former associate of Lowenstein's in the civil rights movement. Sweeney was later found not responsible for the killing due to mental illness.

In June 1985 it was announced that the search for Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal known as the "Angel of Death," who had been wanted for the torture and murder of inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp, had come to a conclusion. Forensic scientists declared that his remains had been found in a grave in Säo Paulo, Brazil, and had been positively identified as being his remains. Mengele reportedly drowned in 1979 and was buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard.

In October 1984 FBI agent Richard Miller, an agent for twenty years, was arrested on espionage charges, the first FBI agent ever to be so charged. He was convicted on bribery and espionage charges on 19 June 1986.

In June 1986 Jonathan J. Pollard pleaded guilty to his involvement in an espionage conspiracy on behalf of Israel. His wife, Ann Henderson Pollard, also pleaded guilty to conspiring to receive embezzled government property and possession of national defense documents.

In January 1989 Patrick Edward Purdy, a former student at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, returned to the school grounds, killing five students and wounding twenty-nine others and a teacher. He then committed suicide with a pistol.

In September 1989 Richard Ramirez, the so-called California "Night Stalker," was convicted of the serial-killing murders of several of his victims.

In August 1989 baseball legend Pete Rose was banned from the game for life. Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti had concluded that Rose had gambled on baseball games, including games involving the Cincinnati Reds while Rose had been the manager of the team.

In August 1986 postal worker Patrick Sherrill killed fourteen coworkers at the Edmund, Oklahoma, post office and wounded seven others. He reportedly had received a verbal reprimand the previous day from a supervisor. He then committed suicide.

In January 1989 former criminal lawyer Joel Steinberg was found guilty in New York City of the first-degree manslaughter death by beating of his six-year-old, illegally adopted daughter, Lisa. The details of the case drew nationwide attention to the ongoing problems of child abuse.

In October 1980 Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, age thirty-five, was sentenced in New York for illegal possession of dynamite as the result of a Greenwich Village explosion in 1970 that killed three persons. She was sentenced to nine months for her part in the 1969 "Days of Rage" disturbances.

In June 1981 Wayne B. Williams was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, for the serial murders of twenty black children and young adults. He was later convicted on several counts of murder in connection with these deaths.