TODAY IN CRIME: August 24

The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre by François Dubois

1572 Roman Catholic mobs killed 70,000 French Protestants, or Huguenots, in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris.

1751 Hertfordshire authorities executed Thomas Colley for drowning a supposed witch.

1814 The British invaded Washington, D.C., and set fire to the White House and the Capitol during the War of 1812.

1954 At the height of McCarthyism, U.S. President Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, virtually outlawing the Communist Party in the U.S.

1970 A bomb planted by antiwar extremists exploded at the University of Wisconsin's Army Math Research Center in Madison, killing researcher Robert Fassnacht.

1981 Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Dennis Edwards sentenced Mark David Chapman to 20 years to life in prison for the murder of rock musician John Lennon.

1989 MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti banned former player and Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose for gambling on his own team.

1990 A judge in Reno, NV dismissed a case against the band Judas Priest, ruling it was not responsible for the suicides of two youths after they had listened to the band's music.

2001 U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was randomly picked to take over the Microsoft antitrust case. She was tasked with determining the extent of Microsoft’s monopolistic business practices and ended up accepting most of the settlement proposed by the Department of Justice.

2001 In 2001 In McAllen, TX, Bridgestone/Firestone agreed to settle out of court and pay a reported $7.5 million to the Rodriguez family of south Texas. Several members suffered injuries in a rollover accident in their Ford Explorer five months before Firestone announced the recall of 6.5 million tires.

2004 Chechnyan suicide bombers detonated explosive devices aboard two airliners departing Domodedovo International Airport, near Moscow, killing 89 passengers. An investigation revealed lax security and bribes allowed the two bombers, both female, to board the planes.

2007 A Florida judge sentenced convicted sex offender John Evander Couey to death for kidnapping 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, raping her, and burying her alive. Couey died in prison of natural causes before he could be executed.

2007 A federal judge sentenced James Ford Seale, a former Ku Klux Klansman, to three life terms for his role in the 1964 abduction and murder of two black teenagers in Mississippi. Seale and his cohorts suspected the young men were civil rights activists.

2007 The NFL suspended Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick for his involvement in dogfighting.

2012 A California jury found Samsung guilty of patent infringement and awarded over $1 billion (U.S.) in damages to Apple. The same day, a South Korean court found both Apple and Samsung guilty of patent infringement.

2013 A gang battle involving flame throwers killed 30 people in Palmasola prison, a maximum-security facility in Bolivia.

2018 Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler sent a cease-and-desist letter to President Trump demanding he stop using the band's songs at rallies.

2019 Responding to intense media scrutiny, Britain's Prince Andrew released a statement denying any knowledge of his friend Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement in the sexual trafficking of underage girls.

TODAY IN CRIME: June 22

photo credit: Britannica

1611 The crew of famed explorer Henry Hudson mutinied during his voyage to find a northwest passage. Thirteen starving and homesick crewmen put Hudson, his son, and seven others off the Discovery; the stranded men were never heard from again. After the ship returned to England, the crew was arrested for mutiny but none was punished for it—or for murder.

1633 The Inquisition sentenced Galileo to life in prison for teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The sentence was reduced the following day to house arrest for life.

1772 The Court of King’s Bench ruled in Somerset v Stewart that slavery is unsupported by English common law.

1839 Cherokee tribesmen assassinated tribal leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which had led to the Trail of Tears.

1870 The U.S. Congress created the Department of Justice.

1897 Indian revolutionaries Mahadeo Vinayak Ranade and the three Chapekar brothers assassinated British colonial officers Charles Walter Rand and Lt. Charles Egerton Ayerst in Pune, Maharashtra, India "for atrocities committed on the people of Pune under the guise of plague eradication." The killers were later caught and hanged.

1953 A Brooklyn newspaper delivery boy dropped a nickel he was given as change. It broke open and revealed microfilm from a Soviet spy.

1964 In Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, the U.S. Supreme Court voted that the book Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller was not obscene and could not be banned in the U.S.

1977 Former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell began serving a sentence for his role in the Watergate cover-up.

1981 Mark David Chapman pleaded guilty to killing rock musician John Lennon.

1992 The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that hate-crime laws that ban cross-burning and similar expressions of racial bias violate free-speech rights (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul).

1998 In Pennsylvania Bd. Of Probation and Parole v. Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that evidence illegally obtained by authorities could be used at revocation hearings for a convicted criminal's parole.

1999 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that persons with remediable handicaps cannot claim discrimination in employment under the Americans with Disability Act (Olmstead v. L.C.).

2004 A Belgian court gave convicted child molester and murderer Marc Dutroux the maximum sentence—life in prison—for the kidnap, rape, and murder of young girls.

2011 Federal authorities found and arrested legendary Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger in Santa Monica, Calif.