TODAY IN CRIME: June 15

photo credit: Historic UK

1381 King Richard II's forces crushed the Peasants’ Revolt in London. Sir William Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, struck down insurgent leader Wat Tyler with his sword as the 14-year-old king looked on.

1648 Midwife Margaret Jones was hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1904 More than 1,000 people on an annual church outing burned to death or drowned when fire erupted aboard the steamboat General Slocum in New York City's East River. Fire hoses and life preservers were rotten and lifeboats were inaccessible; the crew had never practiced a fire drill. Eight employees of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company were indicted although only the captain served any time for criminal negligence.

1917 Great Britain pledged the release of all the Irish captured during the Easter Rebellion of 1916; the last of the republican prisoners were released a year later.

1970 In Los Angeles, jury selection began in the trial of Charles Manson for the Tate-LaBianca murders.

1972 Police in Langenhagen captured Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction, a West German far-left militant group. For several years Meinhof had participated in a range of terrorist activities including bombings, robbery, kidnapping, and shootings.

1983 In City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced its position on abortion by striking down state and local restriction on abortions. It declared unconstitutional the requirement that abortions after the first trimester be performed in a hospital, that an unmarried minor under 15 must obtain parental consent or a judicial bypass, that the mother must wait 24 hours, that a doctor must inform the patient of the stage of fetal development, the supposed health risks of abortion and the availability of adoption and live birth resources, and that the fetal remains be disposed of "in a human and sanitary manner."
In 1992 the case was overruled by the plurality in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

1985 Soviet Lithuanian national Bronius Maigys attacked Rembrandt's painting Danaë in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Maigys threw sulfuric acid on the canvas and cut it twice with a knife. He was judged insane and spent eight years in an asylum; it took experts twelve years to repair the damage.

1986 Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant dismissed plant director Viktor Bryukhanov and chief engineer Nikolai Fomin for not following safety protocols during the April 26 nuclear accident. At least 26 people died, hundreds were hospitalized, and more than 100,000 people evacuated from contaminated areas in the Ukraine and Belarus. Six former officials and technicians of the plant were found guilty of violating safety regulations and sentenced to up to 10 years in labor camps.

1992 In United States v. Alvarez-Machain, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a criminal suspect kidnapped from a foreign country could be prosecuted in a U.S. court.

1995 During his murder trial, O.J. Simpson struggled to put on a pair of gloves that prosecutors claimed were worn by the killer of Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Police found one bloody glove at the murder scene and one at Simpson’s estate.

2003 After five weeks of testimony and ten days of deliberation, a Houston jury convicted accounting firm Arthur Andersen of obstruction of justice for shredding documents related to its audit of energy giant Enron. Although the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction in 2005, the accounting firm did not survive.

2006 In Hudson v. Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that even when police violate the knock-and-announce requirement, subsequently discovered evidence may still be admitted at trial.