Michael Skakel
On June 7, 2002, Michael Skakel is convicted in the 1975 murder of his former Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor, 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, was later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
June 6, 2013 CNN
Mexican authorities say they've rescued 165 migrants who were apparently kidnapped as they tried to cross into the United States.
The victims were held for weeks in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico's Interior Ministry said Thursday.
A majority of the migrants -- 150 -- are from Central America. Another 14 are Mexican nationals, and one is from India, the ministry said.
They were held for as many as three weeks, officials said.
"The victims said that they had the intention of entering the United States of America, but they were held against their will while a suspected criminal group contacted their families by phone and demanded different sums of money that were sent to their kidnappers," Interior Ministry spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.
June 5, 2013 The Morning Journal By KAYLEE REMINGTON
ELYRIA — Nancy Smith took off her glasses to wipe tears from her face and couldn’t contain her smiles yesterday when she learned she would not have to return to prison.
Visiting Judge Virgil Sinclair approved an agreement hammered out by Smith’s attorneys and Lorain County prosecutors that sentenced Smith to 12 years in prison, but gave her credit for the 15 years she already spent behind bars after being convicted in the Lorain Head Start sexual molestation case in 1994.
Family, friends and supporters filled the courtroom and exchanged hugs and kisses after hearing the sentence.
Sinclair, a retired Stark County judge appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court, also reduced Smith’s rape charges to the lesser offense of gross sexual imposition.
Smith and co-defendant Joseph Allen spent 15 years in prison before Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge acquitted the pair in 2009 when they went before him to correct a sentencing error. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled later Burge exceeded his authority and Smith and Allen would have to be resentenced.
Melissa Drexler
On June 6, 1997, eighteen-year-old Melissa Drexler gives birth to a baby boy in the bathroom stall at her high school prom at an Aberdeen Township banquet hall. Maintenance workers called to clean up blood found in the stall discover a bag in the garbage with her dead baby inside.
Robert Kennedy
On June 5, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by 22-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan.
June 4, 2013 Associated Press
CENTENNIAL, Colo. -- A judge accepted James Holmes' long-awaited plea of not guilty by reason of insanity Tuesday and ordered him to undergo a mental evaluation — an examination that could be a decisive factor in whether the Colorado theater shooting suspect is convicted and sentenced to die.
The judge also granted prosecutors access to a hotly contested notebook that Holmes sent to a psychiatrist shortly before the July 20 rampage, which left 12 people dead and 70 injured in a bloody, bullet-riddled movie theater in suburban Denver.
Taken together, the three developments marked a major step forward in the 10-month-old case, which at times has inched along through thickets of legal arguments or veered off on tangents.
Holmes faces more than 160 counts of murder and attempted murder, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Angela Yvonne Davis
On June 4, 1972, Angela Yvonne Davis, a black militant, former philosophy professor at the University of California, and self-proclaimed communist, is acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping by an all-white jury in San Jose, California.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
