TODAY IN CRIME: July 6

photo credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

1415 The Catholic Church burned Czech theologian and church reformer Jan Hus at the stake as a heretic. He sang Psalms as the flames engulfed him.

1535 Sir Thomas More was beheaded for treason—he refused to join Henry VIII's Church of England.

1699 Colonial authorities captured pirate Captain William Kidd in Boston, MA, and deported him back to England.

1892 Three thousand eight hundred striking steelworkers fought a day-long battle with Pinkerton agents hired by Carnegie Steel during the Homestead Strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania. About 700 members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the nation’s strongest trade union, objected to production demands not in their contract and the remaining workers joined them. State militia troops helped Carnegie restore order. Nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed and dozens were left wounded during the confrontation. The strike lost momentum over the next few months and the union lost power, allowing Carnegie to institute longer hours and lower wages.

1905 Officials in Europe and the U.S. exchanged fingerprints for the first time, in the case of John Walker.

1918 Members of Cheka, a Soviet secret police organization, assassinated German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach in Moscow, sparking the Left Socialist Revolutionaries uprising in Russia.

1944 Future baseball legend Jackie Robinson, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, refused to move to the back of a bus in Camp Hood, Texas, leading to a general court-martial on charges of insubordination and disrespect under the Articles of War. He was fully acquitted.

1944 A carelessly tossed cigarette started a blaze in the big top tent of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Conn. 167 people died trying to escape. The circus paid out almost $5,000,000 to 600 victims and families over the next 10 years.

1981 An Argentine federal court freed former President of Argentina Isabel Peron after five years of house arrest.

1983 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled (Arizona Governing Comm. v. Norris) that retirement plans could not pay women smaller monthly payments solely because of their gender.

1988 In one of the worst offshore oil disasters, an explosion and resulting gas and oil fires destroyed Piper Alpha, an oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. 167 men were killed; 61 escaped and survived. The insured loss came to almost two billion dollars, making it one of the costliest man-made catastrophes in history. A Public Inquiry in Scotland found Occidental Petroleum, Piper Alpha's operator, guilty of sustaining inadequate maintenance and safety procedures, but no criminal charges were ever brought against the company.

1989 Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad seized the steering wheel of commuter bus 405 en route from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem and drove it over a cliff, killing 16 passengers. (Yehuda Meshi Zahav, one of the students from a nearby yeshiva who ran to help, later founded ZAKA, an Israeli volunteer rescue service organization.) Ghanim survived and received sixteen life sentences for murder, hijacking, and terrorism.

1997 In Cambodia, co-premier Hun Sen ousted co-premier Norodom Ranariddh. Hun Sen is still prime minister as of 2020.

2000 A Missouri jury awarded former NHL player Tony Twist $24 million for the unauthorized use of his name in the comic book Spawn and the HBO cartoon series. Co-defendant HBO settled with Twist out of court for an undisclosed amount.

2005 A federal judge jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name (Valerie Plame).

2010 A California court sentenced actor Lindsay Lohan to 90 days in jail for violating her probation and 90 days in a residential substance-abuse. She served 14 days behind bars.

2013 Boko Harem gunmen attacked a government-run boarding school in Yobe State, Nigeria, killing at least 42 people, mostly students. Yobe governor Ibrahim Geidam closed all secondary schools for the rest of the year and claimed the attack could have been prevented if there had not been a cell phone outage that kept citizens from reporting suspicious persons.

2013 An unattended 74-car freight train loaded with crude oil running at 65 mph derailed near the downtown area of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Multiple tank cars erupted in flames. 47 people were killed and the center of town half-destroyed. Most victims had to be identified from DNA samples and dental records.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada found 18 factors that contributed to the disaster, including unresolved mechanical problems, negligent brakemen, insufficient training of employees, a lax safety culture within the train company, and inadequate oversight by Transport Canada.

Jurors acquitted the locomotive engineer, rail traffic controller, and operations manager, each charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death.

2013 A Boeing 777 operating as Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from Korea crashed on its descent to San Francisco International Airport, killing three and injuring 181 of the 307 people on board. An investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the flight crew mismanaged the airplane's final approach. Seventy-two passengers reached an undisclosed settlement with Asiana Airlines and Boeing in 2015 but as many as 100 more lawsuits filed in China, South Korea, and the U.S. remain unsettled.