Judicial Killing Quotes

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You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.
Ronan Farrow (Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)
Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].
Ernesto Che Guevara
I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.
Savo Heleta (Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia)
From my keen observation, it is a very sad fact that the Philippines’ current administration's drug war crisis has fully pressed the pedal of acceleration to more division, hatred, cycles of violence (copycat killings, summary killings, extra judicial killings, collateral victims of drug war), toxic revenge, and perpetual impunity. ~ Angelica Hopes, reflections on Drug War in the Philippines
Angelica Hopes
To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the actual crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber. Someone killed by a robber, knifed at night in forest or somewhere, certainly keeps hoping for a rescue right up to the last second. There have been instances of people whose throats have been cut still hoping for rescue right up to the last second. There have been instances of people whose throats have been cut still hoping, or running away, or pleading for their lives. But all this final hope, which makes dying ten times easier is taken away by that certain; the sentence is pronounced and the whole agony resides in the fact that there’s no escape. There is no greater torture in the world than that. Fetch a soldier and stand him right in front of a cannon during a battle and fire at him, he’ll go on hoping; but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier and he’ll go off his head or bust into tears. Who can say that human nature can bear such a thing like that without going mad? Why this disgusting pointless, unnecessary mockery? Perhaps there exists a man who has had his sentence read out to him and been allowed to suffer before being told: “Be off, you’ve been pardoned.” That man could tell you perhaps. Christ himself spoke of such agony and terror. No, a man should not be treated so!
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)
[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials.
Michael Coren (Why Catholics are Right)
to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.30 Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission. The psychologist Linda Skitka31 finds that when people have strong moral feelings about a controversial issue—when they have a “moral mandate”—they care much less about procedural fairness in court cases. They want the “good guys” freed by any means, and the “bad guys” convicted by any means. It is thus not surprising that the administration of George W. Bush consistently argues that extra-judicial killings, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and harsh physical treatment of prisoners are legal and proper steps in fighting the Manichaean “war on terror.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
The truth is that, despite all this, a black man was elected president of the United States: the ultimate advancement, and thus the ultimate affront. Perhaps not surprisingly, voting rights were severely curtailed, the federal government was shut down, and more than once the Office of the President was shockingly, openly, and publicly disrespected by other elected officials. And as the judicial system in state after state turned free those who had decided a neighborhood’s “safety” meant killing first and asking questions later, a very real warning was sent that black lives don’t matter.
Carol Anderson (White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide)
The bottom line was, if I could outsmart the judicial/legal system, then I could keep my addiction. But was that really what I wanted? Here I am, talking about my addiction as if it were some small and innocent pet, something that merited my unconditional affection. Wasn’t it tearing my life apart?
Michael J Heil (Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose)
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.” Besides, he said, the concept of justice was a hypocritical creation of Western capitalists. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail,” Che insisted, “this is a revolution.… A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine, motivated by pure hate.
Annie Jacobsen (Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins)
You don’t know, my dear minister, all that can be made in the provinces of a judicial affair when adroitly manipulated, — cooked, as I may say. In my long and laborious career at the bar I saw plenty of that kind of miracle. But a parliamentary debate is another thing. In that there’s no need of proof; one can kill one’s man with probabilities and assertions, if hotly maintained.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
Let us leave it at this,” said Atticus dryly. “You, Miss Scout Finch, are the common folk. You must obey the law.” He said that the Ewells were members of an exclusive society made up of Ewells. In certain circumstances the common folk judiciously allowed them certain privileges by the simple method of becoming blind to some of the Ewells’ activities. They didn’t have to go to school, for one thing. Another thing, Mr. Bob Ewell, Burris’s father, was permitted to hunt and trap out of season.
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Murder by judicial sentence is immeasurably more horrible than murder committed by a bandit. The person who’s murdered by a bandit has his throat cut at night, in a forest, or somewhere like that, and he certainly hopes to be rescued, right up to the very last moment. There have been examples of people whose throats have been cut still hoping, or running away, or begging for their lives. But here, all this final hope, with which it’s ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain;
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)
In the USA, the “corporament” exists as the: military (defense/offense) + industrial + academic (schooling – at all levels – as prison) + “corporament” entertainment (Hollywood, media, advertising/consumerism/commercialization, propaganda/psychological warfare) + judicial (defense and prosecutorial lawyers, judges, law enforcement/police, prisons) + financial (banks, accounting firms) + religion + petrochemical/pharmaceutical (drugs, antibiotics, antibacterials, vaccines, pesticides – toxins to kill or put you at “dis-ease” and drugs to “treat” you) + imperial commu-soci-capitofasdemocracism system/society/economy/Western thinking = Military-industrial-academic-“corporament” entertainment-judicial-financial-religion-petrochemical/pharmaceutical complex.
Irucka Ajani Embry (Balancing the Rift: ReCONNECTualizing the Pasenture)
They were people [Ewells], but they lived like animals. 'They can go to school any time they want to, when they show the faintest of wanting an education,' said Atticus. 'There are ways of keeping them in school buy force, but it's silly to force people like the Ewells into a new environment -' 'If I did not go to school tomorrow, you'd force me to.' 'Let us leave it at this,' said Atticus dryly. 'You, Miss Scout Finch, are of the common folk. You must obey the law'. He said that the Ewells were members of an exclusive society made up of Ewells. In certain circumstances the common folk judiciously allowed them certain privileges by the simple method of becoming blind to some of the Ewells' activities. They didn't have to go to school, for one thing. Another thing, Mr Bob Ewell, Burris's father, was permitted to hunt, and trap out of season.
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Some judicial officials began to notice the unusual frequency of deaths among the inmates of institutions and some prosecutors even considered asking the Gestapo to investigate the killings. However, none went so far as Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg who specialized in matters of wardship and adoption. A war veteran and a member of the Confessing Church, Kreyssig became suspicious when psychiatric patients who were wards of the court and therefore fell within his area of responsibility began to be transferred from their institutions and were shortly afterwards reported to have died suddenly. Kreyssig wrote Justice Minister Gortner to protest against what he described as an illegal and immoral programme of mass murder. The Justice Minister's response to this and other, similar, queries from local law officers was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda. Late in April 1941 the Justice Ministry organized a briefing of senior judges and prosecutors by Brack and Heyde, to try to set their minds at rest. In the meantime, Kreyssig was summoned to an interview with the Ministry's top official, State Secretary Roland Freisler, who informed him that the killings were being carried out on Hitler's orders. Refusing to accept this explanation, Kreyssig wrote to the directors of psychiatric hospitals in his district informing them that transfers to killing centres were illegal, and threatening legal action should they transport any of their patients who came within his jurisdiction. It was his legal duty, he proclaimed, to protect the interests and indeed the lives of his charges. A further interview with Gortner failed to persuade him that he was wrong to do this, and he was compulsorily retired in December 1941.
Richard J. Evans (The Third Reich at War (The History of the Third Reich, #3))
Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America
David Talbot (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government)
As the months rolled on, John and Sarah began to understand themselves less as teachers and more as parents, living into the names Baba and Kama Kiwawa. It was clear the boys needed something Keu couldn’t provide, consistent support and affection. Sarah started giving out hugs and bandages, and John role-modeled manhood by providing food, shelter, and an education. But unlike many parents, John and Sarah didn’t dole out punishments. They left that to the council. On his first visit, Keu had appointed six boys with hair sprouting on their chins as the elders of Kiwawa. He spent a week with them on a hill near Kiwawa where he instructed them in the ways of a traditional elder council, showing them how to resolve problems that might arise according to the Pokot traditions. And each night after the guard heard John’s snores rumbling out of the camper, the council built a fire and legislated the day’s problems according to the nomadic values they had learned, sometimes choosing to defer ruling on more complicated matters until Keu returned. Stolen writing stick? The elders huddled together in the shadow of the illuminated acacia tree. The oldest returned and pointed at the offender: “Water-fetching duty for a week.” “Oee,” the boys would shout, the Pokot version of Amen. “Refusing to share meat?” “Three rope whippings.” “Oee.” “Crying because you miss your mother?” “Spend more time with Kama,” the oldest boy would say with compassion. “Oee.” “We were modeling the Pokot elders by becoming the keepers of justice and fairness. You see, Pokot elders can never settle a matter based on anger or some personal retribution. That is so unacceptable,” Michael explained. “A punishment is meant to reform the person as quickly as possible so the criminal can be brought back into the group. This is because every single person has a job to do, whether it is to fetch water, herd cows, or stand guard against Karamoja. And if you are gone, then someone else has to work harder in your absence. Nomads do not have prisons like the modern world, which changes our whole entire judicial system. In America you can lock somebody up in prison for two years for just a small crime like stealing a cow. And while in prison they are taken out of the community and are expected to think about what they have done. And then after those two years of isolation, a group of psychologists and lawyers and I don’t know who else will examine that person and see if they have changed their stealing ways. If not, then they lock them back up,” he said, turning an invisible key. “In America there is the potential to give up on somebody, to leave them outside of the community. But there are no prisons in the desert, and without prisons the elders are left with two choices: reform you or kill you. And as I said, if they kill you, they are not only losing a good worker, but also a brother and a son. And the desert has already taken so many of our sons.
Nathan Roberts (Poor Millionaires: The Village Boy Who Walked to the Western World and the American Boy Who Followed Him Home)
America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
The Republican authorities could not initially prevent extra-judicial killing in their territory because the military coup itself had completely collapsed the police and army as the instruments of public order while it had also generated a huge surge of fear and anger. But the regime subsequently rebuilt public order – not least to put an end to murder.
Helen Graham (The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (The Canada Blanch / Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain))
The law is the law. I'm just saying that for most of the judicial system, you do your crime, you serve your time. Brewster went to jail but he's still serving time and will be for the rest of his life. Ironically enough, he would've been slightly better off had he killed the girl instead of sleeping with her. And as a member of the judicial system, I'm not comfortable with that analysis.
Lisa Gardner (The Neighbor (Detective D.D. Warren, #3))
In 2013, a federal judge ruled in favor of Judicial Watch, chastising the agency for withholding documents, and he specifically ruled against DHS’s improper claim of attorney-client privilege. The documents uncovered by Judicial Watch showed that DHS officials misled Congress and the public about its implementation of a new policy that resulted in the dismissal of multiple deportation cases against illegal alien criminals convicted of violent crimes. The administration decided to halt almost all enforcement actions (on an alleged “case-by-case” basis) against any illegal alien who has not committed any other “serious” crimes. As a result, it is failing to protect citizens from the scourge of rampant illegal immigration and criminal illegal aliens. In 2014, Judicial Watch filed another FOIA lawsuit to get more information about this issue, after the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reported that 36,000 criminal aliens who were awaiting the outcome of deportation proceedings were released by DHS in 2013.3 This group consisted of aliens convicted of hundreds of serious, often violent crimes, including homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. The 36,000 criminal aliens had nearly 88,000 convictions, including one for willfully killing a public official with a gun. Yet this alien, and tens of thousands of other dangerous thugs, were released by DHS onto an unsuspecting American public.
Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
The intricate reality of the state means that there are many simultaneous and seemingly contradictory truths; the inbuilt volatility of the situation creates pressure to take sides and be boxed in by simplistic labels of for and against. If you feel empathy with or admiration for the men in uniform who have over the years battled both venom and violence, dubbed ‘occupiers’ by separatists in a conflict that was not of their making, you are instantly called a jingoist and a status-quoist. If you speak honestly about the emotional alienation in the Kashmir Valley or condemn any violent subversion of the law or extra-judicial killings you are classified as treacherous and anti-national. It was rare to have both labels foisted on the same person—that privilege was mine.
Barkha Dutt (This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines)
A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found that under President Bill Clinton, unanimous judicial nominees—those who ended up having zero votes cast against their nomination—waited an average of 17 days to receive their confirmation votes. Under President George W. Bush, the wait was 29 days. Under President Obama, it was 125 days.
Adam Jentleson (Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy)
Considerable educational effort has now and again been made to develop in students the ability to reason their ways through complex moral dilemmas, and to formulate morally enlightened choices as a result. But there is no evidence that, once having acquired such moral reasoning skills, these students will behave any better than their morally untutored peers when it comes to the willingness of the great human majority, when circumstance are “right,” to engage in state-authorized aggression and killing in wars, participation in judicial executions, perpetration of school and adult bullying, domestic abuse, endorsement of torture in the name of national security, depredation of the world's natural resources and biodiversity in the interests of human development and financial gain—a list that could be continued at some length. The moral bridge is a bridge that relatively few cross automatically and naturally, from morally reasoned judgement to moral conduct.
Steven James Bartlett (Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning)
he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest: Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
One of the controversial Bush nominees the Gang of Fourteen deal failed to stop was a partisan operative with no judicial experience. His qualifications were primarily political, having been an assistant to Special Investigator Kenneth Starr before becoming staff secretary to President George W. Bush. An active member of the Federalist Society, he had been nominated in 2003, before the Gang’s deal was struck, but the Senate declined to confirm him due to his extreme partisanship and lack of qualifications. Daring Democrats to block him again and give Republicans a reason to go nuclear, Bush renominated him in 2005. His hearings were contentious, but he made it through the committee.68 Intimidated by Republicans’ continued threats to go nuclear, Democrats declined to filibuster him when his nomination came to the floor. On May 26, 2006, by a vote of 57 to 36, he was confirmed to the U.S.
Adam Jentleson (Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy)
Ifness pursed his lips judiciously. “All folk, mercantilists as well as tavern-keepers and musicians, try to relate their work to abstract universals. We mercantilists are highly sensitive to theft, which stabs at our very essence. To steal is to acquire goods by a simple, informal and inexpensive process. To buy identical goods is tedious, irksome and costly. Is it any wonder that larceny is popular? Nonetheless it voids the mercantilist’s reasons for being alive; we regard thieves with the same abhorrence that musicians might feel for a fanatic gang which beat bells and gongs whenever musicians played.” Frolitz stifled an ejaculation. Ifness tasted the mug of green cider which Loy had set before him. “To repeat: when a thief steals property he steals life. For a mercantilist I am tolerant of human weakness, and I would not react vigorously to the theft of a day. I would resent the theft of a week; I would kill the thief who stole a year of my life.” Jack Vance. The Anome (Durdane Book 1)
Jack Vance (The Anome (Durdane, #1))
I killed everyone in the book. But I was the only one who died in reality.
Niedria Kenny (Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player)
Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.” These astonishing observations about Dallas were captured in Peyrefitte’s memoir, C’était de Gaulle (It Was de Gaulle), which was published in France in 2002, three years after the author’s death. Snippets of the conversation appeared in the U.S. press, but the book was not translated and published in America, and de Gaulle’s remarks about the Kennedy assassination were never fully reported outside of France. A
David Talbot (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government)
GENERAL STANLEY WAS still blinking in astonishment at Grey’s brief description of the events that had culminated in his own appointment as military governor—Grey judiciously suppressing the facts that Azeel had commissioned an Obeah man to drive the previous governor mad and that Rodrigo had gone one step further and arranged to have the late Governor Warren killed and partially devoured—
Diana Gabaldon (Seven Stones to Stand or Fall: A Collection of Outlander Fiction)