CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-DUE PROCESS-RIGHT OF ACCUSED TO WRIT OF ERROR CORAM NOBIS

Petitioner, a nineteen year old Negro, was convicted of rape in a circuit court of Alabama. The conviction, largely predicated on a confession made by petitioner on July 3, 1946, to the local police, was affirmed on April 24, 1947, by the Supreme Court of Alabama. This petition was subsequently initiated before the Alabama Supreme Court seeking an order granting permission to petition the trial court for a writ of error coram nobis. The request was accompanied by an allegation that petitioner\u27s confession had been induced by mental and physical torture administered by the local police. At no time during the previous trial and appeal had petitioner or his counsel offered any indication that his confession was not voluntary. In fact, all the testimony concerning the confession was uncontradicted and was to the effect that petitioner made the disclosure to get it all off his chest. The petition in the new proceeding was supported only by the affidavits of three men who had been in jail with petitioner at the time of the confession. The state was allowed to introduce evidence, and a hearing on the evidence was conducted by the Alabama Supreme Court which held, by a vote of six to one, that the petition should be denied. The denial of an opportunity to be heard in the trial court was alleged by petitioner to be a deprivation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari. Held, affirmed. In view of the implausibility of the allegation of coercion, the Alabama court was within its constitutional authority in denying the petition. Justice Murphy, in a dissenting opinion concurred in by Justices Rutledge and Douglas, expressed the view that since there was some evidence to substantiate petitioner\u27s claim, he should be allowed a hearing in the trial court. Taylor v. Alabama, 335 U.S. 252, 68 S.Ct. 1415 (1948)

CORPORATIONS-APPLICATION OF STATUTES REQUIRING THAT CORPORATE BUSINESS BE MANAGED BY BOARD OF DIRECTORS

In 1942, X corporation and its stockholders entered into an agreement whereby it was stipulated that the management of all theatres leased or operated by the X corporation, or any subsidiary thereof, would be placed in the hands of Y corporation, a large stockholder. This power of management was to include supervising and directing the buying and booking of all attractions, designating and changing the entertainment policy, hiring and discharging employees, and carrying out such policies or projects as the Board of Directors of the Tenant or its subsidiaries may approve. This agreement was to be effective for a period of nineteen years and was a renewal of a like contract which had been in force for the preceding twenty years. Plaintiff stockholder instituted this action to enjoin defendant Y corporation from continuing the management of X corporation\u27s theatres under this contract. The lower court dismissed the case as no actual injury could be shown nor was any fraud alleged. Held, reversed. The agreement violated the New York statute, which provides: The business of a corporation shall be managed by its board of directors. Long Park, Inc. v. Trenton-New Brunswick Theatres Co., (N.Y. 1948) 77 N.E. (2d) 633

FUTURE INTERESTS - POWERS-FRAUD ON A SPECIAL POWER

H was co-trustee under a trust agreement executed by his father which provided for payment of a specified monthly sum to H for life and after his death to his wife W. The trust was to terminate upon the death of the survivor of H and W, and thereupon the other trustee was to deliver 20% of the corpus to each of three named persons, A, B, and C. The trust instrument further provided that H was to have absolute power, with approval of the co-trustee, to prescribe that the distribution of this 60% of the corpus should be made in different proportions than those provided. W predeceased H. H remarried and, desiring to secure a benefit for his second wife from the trust, proposed that each of the three beneficiaries, A, B, and C, agree to pay a sum equal to 7½% of the total trust fund to R, the second wife, on receipt of their 20% shares. A and B agreed to this proposal but C refused to assent. H thereupon purported to exercise his power and changed the percentages to read, 28% to A, 28% to B, and 4% to C. This change was approved by the co-trustee and shortly thereafter the trust was terminated by the death of H. C sought a declaratory judgment as to the effect of the attempted exercise of the power. Held, the attempted exercise was void as a fraud on the power, since it was made for the purpose of benefiting a non-object. Horne v. Title Insurance and Trust Co., (D.C. Cal. 1948) 79 F. Supp. 91

CONFLICT OF LAWS-ENFORCING TAX LAWS OF SISTER STATES

In the recent case City of Detroit v. Proctor, the defendant, a resident of Detroit, was owner of personal property located there in the year 1939. The city levied a tax on this property, which tax became a debt under the laws of Michigan on the first day of April, 1939, and became due and · payable on the 15th of July, 1939. During the month of June, 1939, the defendant removed both his person and his property from the state of Michigan and has since resided elsewhere. The treasurer of the city of Detroit, who is empowered by law to sue in the name of the city for the tax, filed an action in Delaware courts, obtained personal service on the defendant, and attempted to secure a judgment for the amount of the claim. In affirming a dismissal of the action, a superior court of Delaware followed the rule that one state will not enforce the revenue laws of another state. The court found the rule too well established to overthrow, and felt jurisdiction should be refused since the question involves vital interstate relations with which the courts are incompetent to deal without legislative mandate

A mathematical understanding of how cytoplasmic dynein walks on microtubules

Cytoplasmic dynein 1 (hereafter referred to simply as dynein) is a dimeric motor protein that walks and transports intracellular cargos towards the minus end of microtubules. In this article, we formulate, based on physical principles, a mechanical model to describe the stepping behaviour of cytoplasmic dynein walking on microtubules from the cell membrane towards the nucleus. Unlike previous studies on physical models of this nature, we base our formulation on the whole structure of dynein to include the temporal dynamics of the individual subunits such as the cargo ( for example, an endosome, vesicle or bead), two rings of six ATPase domains associated with diverse cellular activities (AAAþ rings) and the microtubule-binding domains which allow dynein to bind to microtubules. This mathematical framework allows us to examine experimental observations on dynein across a wide range of different species, as well as being able to make predictions on the temporal behaviour of the individual components of dynein not currently experimentally measured. Furthermore, we extend the model framework to include backward stepping, variable step size and dwelling. The power of our model is in its predictive nature; first it reflects recent experimental observations that dynein walks on microtubules using a weakly coordinated stepping pattern with predominantly not passing steps. Second, the model predicts that interhead coordination in the ATP cycle of cytoplasmic dynein is important in order to obtain the alternating stepping patterns and long run lengths seen in experiments

Dissecting a galaxy: mass distribution of 2237+0305

We determine the mass distribution of a spiral galaxy, 2237+0305 using both gravitational lensing and dynamical constraints. We find that lensing can break the disc-halo degeneracy. 2237+0305 has a sub-maximal disc, contributing 57+/-3 per cent of the rotational support at the disc maximum. The disc mass-to-light ratio is 1.1+/-0.2 in the I-band and the bulge, 2.9+/-0.5. The dark matter halo, modelled as a softened isothermal sphere, has a large core radius (13.4+/-0.4 kpc, equivalent to 1.4r_d) to high accuracy for the best-fitting solution. The image positions are reasonably well fitted, but require further rotation information to obtain a unique solution.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted by MNRAS, in pres

Long-term chlorophyll monitoring in the Great Barrier Reef Lagoon : status report 1, 1993-1995

In 1992 the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority initiated the Great Barrier Reef Nutrient Status Monitoring Network (hereafter the Network). The broad objectives of the Network are to document the nutrient status of regional waters within the Great Barrier Reef lagoon using chlorophyll a concentration as a proxy nutrient bioindicator. Chlorophyll a is used in preference to routine nutrient analysis because (a) chlorophyll a integrates change in nutrient availability over time; (b) samples are comparatively simple to collect; and (c) chlorophyll a is comparatively inexpensive to analyse. The Network was conceived to be ongoing, and to complement and collaborate with a number of other existing monitoring programs to ensure comprehensive reporting of the status of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)

Forward-backward asymmetry in t anti-t production from flavour symmetries

We show that the forward-backward asymmetry in top quark pair production can be enhanced by fields that transform nontrivially under the flavour group and satisfy Minimal Flavour Violation, while at the same time the constraints from associated effects on the d \sigma(t anti-t)/d M_{t anti-t} distribution, dijet resonance searches, same sign top pair production and other phenomenology are satisfied. We work out two examples in detail, one where a scalar colour anti-sextet field, that is also an anti-sextet of SU(3)_U, enhances the forward-backward asymmetry, and one where the enhancement arises from a vector colour octet field that is also an octet of SU(3)_U.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, v2: PRL version, scalar numerics fixed, conclusions unchange