TODAY IN CRIME: July 27

1245 A council at Lyons deposed Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II after it found him guilty of sacrilege.

1794 The National Convention overthrew French revolutionary and “Reign of Terror” leader Maximilien Robespierre and placed him under arrest; he was executed the following day.

1919 The Chicago Race Riot erupted after a racial incident occurred on a South Side beach. Over the next five days 15 blacks and 23 whites were killed, and 537 injured.

1929 Fifty-three nations signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, dealing with the treatment of prisoners-of-war.

1932 An Assize Court in Paris sentenced to death Paul Gorgulov, who assassinated French president Paul Doumer on May 6. Gorgulov approached Doumer at a book fair at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris and opened fire. Gorgulov, a Russian émigré, believed that France had failed to support the White Movement in Russia against Bolshevism.

1962 Police in Albany, Georgia, put Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail for violating a state circuit court injunction against protests. After two weeks in jail he agreed to stop demonstrations there.

1974 The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Richard Nixon.

1975 Masked men of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam shot dead the mayor of Jaffna and former MP Alfred Duraiappah on his way to temple. Tamil militants considered him a traitor and government collaborator and already attempted to assassinate him by throwing a hand grenade on his car in 1971.

1976 Japanese authorities arrested former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka on suspicion of violating foreign exchange and foreign trade laws in connection with the Lockheed bribery scandals.

1976 Bruce Springsteen sued his manager Mike Appel in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court for fraud and breach of contract. The suit was eventually settled out of court.

1983 At the Welikada high security prison in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sinhalese inmates overpowered the guards, armed themselves with axes and firewood, and attacked and massacred fifteen Tamil political prisoners. It was the second such massacre in two days. The assailants claimed the guards forced them to attack. To this day no one has been punished for these crimes or any victims’ families compensated.

1989 While attempting to land at Tripoli International Airport in Libya, Korean Air Flight 803 crashed just short of the runway. Seventy-five of the 199 passengers and crew and four people on the ground were killed. A Libyan court determined it was crew error; it found the captain and first officer guilty of neglect and sentenced them to two years and eighteen months respectively, with the first officer's sentence eventually suspended.

1990 Zsa Zsa Gabor began a 3-day jail sentence for slapping a police officer in Beverly Hills.

1996 A homemade pipe bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1996 Summer Olympics, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Police originally suspected security guard Richard Jewell but ultimately arrested Eric Rudolph, an anti-abortion and anti-gay activist. Rudolph confessed to the bombings of Olympic Park, two abortion clinics, and a gay nightclub and was sentenced to multiple terms of life in prison.

2002 A Sukhoi Su-27 fighter crashed during an air show at Lviv, Ukraine, killing 77 and injuring more than 100 others, making it the deadliest air show disaster in history. The president of the Ukraine blamed the military and fired the head of the air force. A military court found Pilot Volodymyr Toponar and co-pilot Yuriy Yegorov and three other military officials guilty of failing to follow orders, negligence, and violating flight rules. The pilot and co-pilot, who had not received adequate training or briefing, received 14 and 8 years in prison, respectively.

2005 A U.S. federal court sentenced Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who'd plotted to bomb LAX airport on the eve of the millennium, to 22 years in prison. An appellate court found this sentence too lenient, and he was re-sentenced to 37 years in 2012.

2015 The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Fiat Chrysler a record $105 million for mishandling safety recalls on millions of vehicles.