TODAY IN CRIME: June 29

1804 Members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition court-martialed privates John Collins and Hugh Hall for drinking on duty and stealing whiskey from the supplies. Collins received 100 lashes on his back and Hall received 50.

1903 The British government officially protested Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

1905 Russian troops intervened as riots erupted in ports all over the country, with rioters looting many ships.

1916 A British court sentenced Irish-born diplomat Sir Roger Casement to death for high treason for his part in the Easter Rising.

1946 British authorities arrested more than 2,700 Jews in Palestine in an attempt to end alleged terrorism.

1967 A British court found Keith Richards guilty of allowing his property to be used for the smoking of marijuana and sentenced him to one year in jail and imposed a fine. It found Mick Jagger guilty of illegal possession of pep pills and sentenced him to three months in jail. Neither rocker served time for the offenses.

1972 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia the death penalty could constitute "cruel and unusual punishment," prompting some states to revise their capital punishment laws.

1992 A divided U. S. Supreme Court ruled that women have a constitutional right to abortion, but the justices also weakened the right as defined in the Roe v. Wade decision.

1995 The Sampoong Department store in Seoul, South Korea collapsed, killing 502 people and injuring 937. During construction, owner Lee Joon changed the original plans numerous times (such as adding an ill-advised fifth floor) and fired engineers who warned of structural dangers. Investigations revealed the foundation was poorly laid, the landfill it was built on was unstable, builders used a substandard concrete mix of cement and sea water and poorly enforced concrete for walls and ceilings, failed to use enough reinforcement bars in the concrete, and built floor slabs directly onto columns that were too few and too narrow. Lee Joon was found guilty of criminal negligence and served 7 years. His son and the store's CEO received 7 years for accidental homicide and corruption; two city administrators served sentences for bribery, and other officials, company executives, and construction personnel were jailed.

Lee Joon and the store's CEO offered their entire wealth to compensate the victims' families and ended up paying out $300 million in 3,293 cases.

1999 Los Angeles police arrested teen idol Leif Garret during a sting operation. He pled guilty to drug possession and avoided jail time by agreeing to a stint in rehab.

2006 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law.

2009 Financier Bernard Madoff received a 150-year sentence for his multibillion-dollar fraud.

2011 The state of Nevada passed the first law permitting the operation of autonomous cars on public roads.

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.

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.

TODAY IN CRIME: June 8

photo credit: sciencemag.org

793 Vikings in longships plundered St. Cuthbert's monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England. They massacred the monks indiscriminately and stole irreplaceable relics, gold and silver devotional objects, and precious manuscripts.

1405 King Henry IV ordered the beheading of Archbishop of York Richard le Scrope and Thomas Mowbray, 4^th Earl of Norfolk, for their participation in the Northern Rising against him.

1789 Virginia congressman James Madison proposed a Bill of Rights to the Constitution in the U.S. House of Representatives.

1921 For the second time in a month, Manhattan police arrested Babe Ruth arrested for speeding—he was driving 26 mph. The Sultan of Swat was fined $100 and spent the next day in jail.

1929 Venezuelan rebel Rafael Urbina led the taking of Fort Amsterdam in Curaçao and the kidnapping of the Dutch governor, Leonardus Albert Fruytier, in another doomed attempt to overthrow dictatorial President Juan Vicente Gómez.

1953 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that restaurants in the District of Columbia could not refuse to serve blacks.

1956 American airman Edward C. Clarke shot and killed Technical Sergeant Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. in Saigon, Viet Nam, over a reprimand Clarke received earlier in the day, making Fitzgibbon the first American casualty of the Viet Nam War.

1968 Authorities in London arrested James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

1978 A jury in Clark County, Nevada, ruled that the Howard Hughes "Mormon will" was a forgery.

1984 The Australian state of New South Wales declared homosexuality legal.

1987 Fawn Hall, secretary to national security aide Oliver L. North, testified at the Iran-Contra hearings, saying she had helped to shred some documents.

1987 The Labour government of New Zealand passed legislation against nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered vessels in New Zealand, making it the only nation to legislate against nuclear power.

1988 The judge in the Iran-Contra conspiracy case ruled that Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim had to be tried separately.

1994 A New York judge sentenced mass murderer Joel Rifkin to 203 years in prison for the murders of nine women. He confessed to killing eight more.

1998 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust complaint against semiconductor giant Intel Corp., alleging it used its dominance in the microprocessor market to withhold key information from certain customers and competitors. Intel chips ran about 90 percent of the world's personal computers and it held an 80 percent market share in worldwide chip sales.

1998 Car maker Honda agreed to pay $17.1 million in civil fines for disconnecting anti-pollution devices in 1.6 million cars.

2001 Janitor Mamoru Takuma killed eight children aged 6-8 and injured fifteen others, including two teachers, in a mass stabbing at the Ikeda Elementary school in the Osaka Prefecture of Japan. He was wrestled down by staff within minutes. Takuma had a long history of psychological issues and was diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder. Found guilty of multiple counts of murder, Takuma was executed by hanging only a year later.

2001 The "International Committee for Art and Peace" stole Marc Chagall’s painting Study for 'Over Vitebsk from the Jewish Museum in New York City. The 8x10 painting was valued at about $1 million. The ICAP announced it would return the painting after the Israelis and Palestinians made peace but effected its return in February 2002 by mailing it to a nonexistent address in St. Paul, Minn. It was redirected back to a postal center in Topeka Kansas where an alert employee checked for stolen art on the internet and called the FBI.

2008 Factory worker Tomohiro Katō rented a truck and plowed into a crowd in the Akihabara shopping quarter in Tokyo, Japan, killing three pedestrians. Then he jumped out of the truck and went on a stabbing spree, attacking at least twelve people with a dagger, killing four and injuring eight. Police cornered him in a narrow alley after a brief chase; with a gun pointed at him, Katō dropped his knife. The Tokyo District Court sentenced him to death in 2011.

2009 A North Korean court sentenced two American journalists to twelve years of "reform through labour" for illegally entering the country. Laura Ling and Euna Lee were filming a report about North Korean refugees attempting to cross the narrow Tumen river into China when North Korean guards, objecting to being filmed, came and dragged them across the river from the Chinese side. In 2009, the North Korean government pardoned them after intervention by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

2017 The Kansas Department of Corrections freed Richard Anthony Jones after 17 years of incarceration for robbery after his lookalike was discovered. Without admitting another man committed the crime, in 2018 the state agreed to pay him $1.1 million in compensation and give him a "certificate of innocence.”

2018 WhatsApp rumors of child kidnappers in India prompted a mob in Assam to beat two men to death and injure seven others, one critically. An angry crowd of 1500 in Chandgaon village in Vaijapur, Taluka, cornered Bharat Sonavne and Shivaji Shinde in a nearby farm and attacked them with wooden sticks after receiving fake messages on social media about the presence of a "gang of robbers.” Police booked more than 400 villagers on charges of murder and attempt to murder but made no arrests.
The same day, villagers in Karbi Anglong brutally beat Abhijeet Nath and Nilotpal Das with bamboo poles and wood before torturing them to death. The two friends were returning from a picnic spot where they recorded the sounds of twilight. The mob suspected them of being child lifters. Police arrested fifteen. Unfounded rumors circulated by WhatsApp lead to the deaths of at least 31 innocent citizens in May-June.

TODAY IN CRIME: June 1

"Council of Blood" photo credit: wikipedia

193 The Roman Senate sent a soldier to assassinate Roman Emperor Didius Julianus 66 days into his reign and his rival Severus took over. Julianus had bought the throne in an auction from the Praetorian Guard, which had assassinated the previous emperor.

1568 In Brussels, the Duke of Alva oversaw the decapitation of 22 noblemen condemned by his “Council of Blood,” a tribunal that condemned without trial those suspected of heresy and rebellion.

1660 The Massachusetts Bay Colony hanged Mary Dyer for defying a law banning Quakers from the Puritan colony. She was one of four executed Quakers known as the “Boston martyrs.”

 1862 The African Slave Trade Treaty Act, a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and England, abolished the slave trade in all U.S. possessions.

1877 U.S. President Hayes authorized troops to pursue bandits into Mexico.

1896 The mechanic of motorcar enthusiast Baron de Zuylen de Nyevelt stole his boss's Peugeot in Paris. It was the first recorded automobile theft.

1921 A white mob attacked the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 square blocks known as “Black Wall Street, the wealthiest black community in the U.S. at the time. The day before, a black teenager was arrested and held for assaulting a white woman—he’d accidentally stepped on her foot getting into an elevator—and chaos broke out after the sheriff turned away a lynch mob. Hundreds of blacks were shot, dragged, beaten, and burned. Over two days as many as 300 people were killed, 800 injured, and 10,000 made homeless before National Guard troops arrived. No one was convicted for the violence or damages, no reparations ever paid, and the incident was largely omitted from local, state, and national history books.

1962 Israel executed S.S. officer Adolf Eichmann after finding him guilty of war crimes.

1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace vowed to defy an injunction that ordered the integration of the University of Alabama.

1965 France outlawed the use of performance-enhancing drugs in bicycle racing.

1972 West German police arrested Andreas Baader, leader of the terrorist group Red Army Faction, after a shootout.

1974 Bundy victim Brenda Ball disappeared from Burien, Washington. She was last seen in the parking lot of the Flame Tavern speaking to a man with his arm in a sling.

1977 The Soviet Union formally charged Jewish human rights advocate Anatoly Shcharansky with treason and espionage. He was imprisoned until 1986.

1978 The U.S. reported the finding of wiretaps in the American embassy in Moscow.

1996 Sheriff Junior Kilburn of Lee County, Kentucky arrested actor-activist Woody Harrelson after he symbolically planted four hemp seeds to challenge the state law which did not distinguish between industrial hemp and marijuana.

2001 Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shot and killed his father, mother, sister, brother, and five other members of the royal family before shooting himself. In a coma, Dipendra was king for three days before he died.

2007 The Michigan Department of Corrections released Jack Kevorkian from prison after he served eight years of his 10- to 25-year prison term for the 1998 second-degree murder of Thomas Youk.

2009 General Motors filed for Chapter 11, becoming the largest U.S. industrial company to enter bankruptcy protection. The filing reported $82.29 billion in assets and $172.81 billion in debt.

2009 Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of everyone on board. Investigations concluded the pilots were not properly trained in the procedures to follow when faulty airspeed measurements caused the autopilot to disconnect and the aircraft stalled. Prosecutors considered charging both Airbus and Air France with manslaughter and negligence but ultimately did not; lawsuits filed by the families for compensation are languishing in the French courts.

2009 Abdulhakim Muhammad shot and killed Pvt. William Andrew Long and wounded Pvt. Quinton I. Ezeagwula outside an Army recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. Muhammad claimed that American military actions against Muslims justify the slaying of Americans. The gunman plead guilty to capital murder, attempted capital murder, and gun charges and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

2018 Israeli Defense Forces on the Gaza border shot and killed Rouzan al-Najjar, a 22-year-old Palestinian volunteer medic, as she tried to help evacuate the wounded during the 2018 Gaza border protests. The event sparked widespread condemnation because al-Najjar was clearly a medical worker and not a threat to the Israelis: she was shot after she and other medics, walking with their hands up and wearing white vests, approached the border fence in order to treat a wounded demonstrator.

TODAY IN CRIME: May 25

photo credit: ozy.com

1521 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared Martin Luther an outlaw and ordered his writings burned because he refused to recant his heretical Ninety-Five Theses.

1895 English Judge Sir Alfred Wills convicted playwright Oscar Wilde of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons” and sentenced him to two years' penal servitude with hard labor. After his release Wilde left the UK forever and spent his last three years in poverty.

1925 A Tennessee grand jury indicted teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. The Butler Act prevented public schoolteachers from denying the story of Divine creation as taught in the Bible. After a sensational trial, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100; the verdict was overturned because of a legal technicality.

1926 Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated Symon Petliura, the head of the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic headquartered in Paris during exile. Schwartzbard held Petliura personally responsible for the deaths of 15 family members in the 1919 pograms and freely admitted shooting Petliura. A sympathetic jury acquitted him.

1977 The Chinese government lifted a decade-old ban on William Shakespeare's work, effectively ending the Cultural Revolution started in 1966.

1978 The first bomb of a series of bombings orchestrated by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski detonated at Northwestern University. Campus police officer Terry Marker received minor cuts and burns when a suspicious package exploded as he opened it.

1979 In the worst air disaster in U.S. history (excluding the Sept. 11 attacks), a DC-10 crashed at Chicago's O'Hare airport, killing over 270 people. The American Airlines maintenance crew was found to be at fault and the airline fined $500,000. One of the mechanics responsible killed himself.

1979 The state of Florida executed convicted murderer John Spenkelink in the electric chair. He was the first person to be executed in Florida after capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

1992 Three men shot and killed Khalil Rountree, tour manager for the Grammy Award-winning R&B group Boyz II Men, in a confrontation in an elevator at the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in Chicago. Rountree’s assistant was also wounded in the assault. Only one of the suspects went to trial and served time.

2006 A Texas jury found Enron chief executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling guilty of fraud and conspiracy. The executives took part in a major accounting scandal that led to the largest bankruptcy in history up to that time. Lay died before he could be sentenced. Skilling was sentenced to more than 24 years.

2011 An Arizona judge ruled that Jared Lee Loughner, the man accused of wounding U.S. congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killing six in a shooting rampage, was incompetent to stand trial.

2013 A gas cylinder exploded on a school bus in the Pakistani city of Gujrat, killing 17 children and a teacher and injuring 7 others. The fire started when the driver of the dual-fuel van converted from CNG fuel intake to petrol fuel intake. He fled the van and left it to burn with 25 people inside and was later arrested in a nearby town. The government awarded approximately $7,000 for those killed and $1,000 to those injured.

2018 Two-thirds of the people of Ireland voted to repeal the Eight Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland that prohibited abortion except when the mother’s life was threatened.

TODAY IN CRIME: May 18

1302 In Bruges, weaver Pieter de Coninck led an insurrection of local, untrained Flemish militia against the occupying forces of French King Philip IV. 2,000 people died, mostly French troops.

1593 British authorities issued an arrest warrant for Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe on charges of heresy. Thomas Kyd, the playwright's former roommate, had been arrested but under torture claimed the "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ" found in his room belonged to Marlowe.

1619 The States General of Netherlands sentenced Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius to life in prison for his role in the intra-Calvinist dispute of the Dutch Republic. Grotius supported religious tolerance vs. the Calvinist hard-liners. He escaped in a trunk “full of books” two years later.

1631 In violation of the colony’s charter with England, officers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted voting rights only to church-going Puritan males.

1643 Anne of Austria, widow of French King Louis XIII, convinced the Parlement of Paris to annul her husband's will and make her sole and absolute regent until her son became of age. Louis XIV began his rule in 1661.

1652 The colony of Rhode Island passed the first anti-slavery legislation in North America.

1852 Massachusetts ruled all children 8-14 must attend school for at least three months out of the year. Violators faced a maximum fine of $20 and prosecution by local authorities.

1896 The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson as "separate but equal." The precedent was overturned in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.

1904 Moroccan tribal leader Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli and his bandits kidnapped Greek-American playboy Ion H. Perdicaris and his stepson in Morocco. Raisuli demanded a ransom of $70,000, the release of political prisoners, control of more districts, and other political stipulations. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt sent warships to the Mediterranean, with armed support from England, France, and Spain. Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco acceded to most of Raisuli's demands and the hostages returned home June 24.

1926 Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished from a beach in Santa Monica, California. She reappeared a month later claiming she had been kidnapped.

1927 In the worst school massacre in history, 55-year-old Michigan farmer and school board member Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and firebombed his house and outbuildings before proceeding to the Bath Consolidated School building, where he set off a series of explosions that killed 45 people, mostly children, and injured 58 more. He had been planting explosives in the basement of the elementary school for more than a year. As rescuers arrived, Kehoe detonated dynamite inside his shrapnel-filled truck, killing himself and four others. Rescuers searching for survivors in the debris found 500 pounds of dynamite in the south wing of the school that failed to detonate. Kehoe was angered by higher school taxes and his defeat for the office of Bath Township Clerk and faced eviction from his farm.


1944 The Soviet government deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Germans during World War II. Nearly half of those deported, mostly women and children, perished between 1944 and 1947 in the harsh exile conditions.


1971 Police in Calgary discovered the last victim of vampire rapist Wayne Boden. An orthodontist matched impressions of the bite marks on Elizabeth Anne Porteou to suspect Boden, who admitted to killing four women during rough sex. He would reach a frenzy while strangling his victims and feel compelled to feast on their breasts. An Alberta jury sentenced him to life in prison, making Boden the first murderer convicted in North America on odontological evidence. He received additional life sentences for the three murders committed earlier in Montreal.

1980 In Kwangju South Korea, government troops beat 600 students at Chonnam University gathered to protest the suppression of academic freedom. Civilians opposed to military rule soon joined them, with nearly a quarter of a million people participating in the uprising nationwide over the next three days. By May 27, troops had completely crushed the rebellion, killing as many as 2,000 civilians.

1983 The U.S. Senate passed a revision of immigration laws that would give millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.

1992 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled states cannot force mentally unstable criminal defendants to take anti-psychotic drugs.

1993 Italian police arrested fugitive Mafia boss Benedetto "Nitto" Santapaola in a farmhouse in Sicily. "All things have to end," he reportedly told the arresting officers. Italy’s “Most Wanted Man” had been on the run for 11 years.

1998 The U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general of twenty states filed a sweeping antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., claiming Microsoft made it difficult for consumers to install competing software on computers operated by Windows and was therefore a monopoly. The software giant appealed a federal judge’s order to split into two entities and won, but agreed to share computing interfaces with other companies.

1998 U.S. Treasury and Justice Department officials arrested 142 people and seized $35 million in what is believed to be the largest money laundering case in history. U.S. Customs-led undercover agents of “Operation Casablanca” investigated the money laundering operations of a dozen Mexican banks linked to Colombian and Mexican drug-smuggling cartels.

2003 President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia declared martial law and sent 30,000 troops into Aceh, Sumatra, to suppress a separatist rebellion. The movement finally collapsed in 2005 after the crackdown by the Indonesian military and the devastation wrought by the 2004 tsunami.

2009 The 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka ended. The government announced it had gained control of the last bit of territory held by the Tamil Tigers separatist group and killed its leader.

2010 John Langley, co-owner of the Red and Black Café, in Portland, Oregon, asked police officer James Crooker to leave his store, claiming Crooker's uniformed presence made the customers of his vegan coffeeshop uncomfortable.

2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund after his arrest May 15 on charges that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a midtown New York hotel room. The state eventually dropped the charges of attempted rape, sex abuse, forcible touching, and unlawful imprisonment, although the one-time candidate for the French presidency later settled a civil case for a confidential amount purported to be $6 million.

2018 Armed with a 12-gauge Remington 870 shotgun, a Rossi .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, and explosives, 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis opened fire at the Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas near Houston, fatally shooting eight students and two teachers and wounding 13 others. Police officers stationed at the school returned fire and wounded Pagourtzis, who then surrendered.