TODAY IN CRIME: November 2

619 Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Tang dynasty of China, allowed an envoy of the Eastern Turk Khaganate to assassinate a qaghan (emperor) of the Western Turkic Khaganate after a banquet in Gaozu's palace. When everyone was replete with food and drink, Gaozu lured the emperor to an empty office where he was set upon by assassins. The powerful Eastern Turks made better friends than enemies, and this way Gaozu could repay them for their help during his march on Chang'an.

1859 A Charles Town, Virginia, jury sentenced abolitionist John Brown to death by hanging. On October 31 the jury had found him guilty of murder, conspiring slaves to revolt, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia for his raid at Harper's Ferry October 16-18.

1959 Twenty-One game show contestant Charles Van Doren admitted to the U.S. Congress that he had been given questions and answers in advance.

1960 In London, a jury of nine men and three women found Penguin Books not guilty of obscenity by publishing the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

1963 Army of the Republic of Vietnam Majors Nguyễn Văn Nhung and Dương Hiếu Nghĩa assassinated South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother, political advisor Ngô Đình Nhu, on the orders of RVN General Dương Văn Minh in a coup d'état. With the brothers tied up in the back of an armored personnel carrier, Nhung lunged at Nhu with a bayonet and stabbed him 15-20 times, shot Diem in the head with a semi-automatic, then turned and shot Nhu. No one was ever charged in the killings but Nhung was later executed. His cohort Nghĩa survived the Fall of Saigon. Junta leader Minh was himself deposed in a bloodless coup three months later.

1964 Saudi Arabia formally deposed King Saud and replaced him with his half-brother Faisal.

1965 Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.

1966 The Cuban Adjustment Act took effect, allowing Cuban refugees the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the U.S.

1979 Black militant Assata Olugbala Shakur escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, where she'd been serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. She fled to Pittsburgh; eventually Cuba granted her political asylum. In 2013 she became the first woman added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list; there is a two-million-dollar reward for her return.

1984 Convicted murderer Velma Margie Barfield became the first woman to be executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. No woman had been executed in the U.S. since 1962. Barfield confessed to killing at least five people, although she was tried and executed for only one homicide—poisoning boyfriend Rowland Stuart Taylor with arsenic.

1985 The South African government imposed strict rules of censorship on all media coverage of unrest by both local and foreign journalists. The press of South Africa is still considered only partly free.

1986 Shiite Muslims released American kidnap victim David Jacobsen after holding him in Lebanon for 17 months.

1988 Cornell graduate student Robert Morris launched the Morris worm, the first highly publicized Internet-distributed computer worm, from the computer systems at MIT. In 1990, Morris was the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for penetrating and crippling 6,000 "federal interest" computers nationwide. The U.S. District Court of NDNY sentenced him to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, a $10,050 fine, and costs of his supervision.

1993 The U.S. Senate voted 94-6 to demand full disclosure of Senator Bob Packwood's diaries in a sexual harassment probe. Packwood resigned from the Senate the previous month under threat of expulsion after 19 women came forward alleging sexual harassment, abuse, and assaults. His diaries confirmed the allegations.

1995 Eleven former senior military officers, including former South African defense minister General Magnus Malan, were arrested and charged with the murders of 13 people in the KwaMakhutha apartheid massacre in 1987. All were eventually acquitted.

1995 The U.S. banned Daiwa Bank Ltd. from operating in the United States for allegedly covering up $1.1 billion in trading losses incurred by New York bond trader Toshihide Iguchi over a 12-year period. Daiwa paid a record $340-million fine to settle the fraud case and Iguchi spent four years in prison.

1999 In the worst mass murder in the history of Hawaii, Xerox service technician Byran Koju Uyesugi shot eight people with a Glock 17 handgun at the Xerox building in Honolulu, killing his supervisor and six coworkers. Uyesugi was facing dismissal for refusing to take training on new machines and "decided to give them a reason to fire me."

2010 California voters rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have made the Golden State the first to legalize marijuana for recreational use. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act did succeed in 2016.