Session 10: Exercise 1

Transcriptions are to be prepared using a brailler emulation program (Mac/PCBrailler, Duxbury, Edgar, Megadots, etc.). Files must be submitted electronically. No hardcopy braille will be accepted.

Files done with brailler emulation programs (Mac/PCBrailler, Duxbury, Edgar, Megadots, etc.) should be emailed as text files to Make sure you put your name in electronic braille as a part of the file itself. Please do not send files titled "braille" or "session10a".  If you are sending your work as an email attachment, you should name your files as something unique, such as the first six (6) characters of your email address, and then the characters "S10a", followed by the three letter code (.dxb, .acn, etc.) that your braille software produces. For example, Duxbury files sent by rbroadnax@shodor.org would be titled "broadnaxS10a.dxb", where ".dxb" is the three letter code Duxbury uses for its files. The limit on the part of the file before the dot is eight (8).(Note we are no longer accepting submissions).

Format:

This exercise is designed for a 40-cell braille line with 25 lines per page. If you must work with something other than a 40-cell braille line, a note should be included as part of your file telling the instructor the number of cells across you are using.

The maximum number of spaces on a braille line should be utilized. Therefore, wherever there is room on a line for one or more syllables and a hyphen, even on the last line of a braille page, as many syllables should be written on that line as space will permit.

The title of the text is "Hard Evidence".

Chapter 1:  A World of Wonders

Not long ago investigators had to find the smoking gun to convict a suspect. Now all they need is the smoke.

On December 16, 1989, federal court judge Robert Vance opened a small box that had been mailed to his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama. When he lifted the lid the box exploded, killing him instantly and seriously wounding his wife. Two days later Savannah, Georgia attorney and alderman Robert Robinson died in his office when a second package bomb exploded as he opened it. That same day a third bomb was discovered during a routine screening of packages mailed to judges in the Atlanta federal courthouse. A fourth package bomb was delivered to a female employee of the NAACP legal counsel in Jacksonville, Florida. She left it on her desk and went to run some errands, intending to open it when she returned later that afternoon. But her car broke down as she drove back to the office and had to be towed, so she went home. On the news that night she heard of the explosion in Savannah and realized that the package on her desk was similar to the one that had killed Robert Robinson. The next morning she called the Jacksonville bomb squad. And she lived.

Fearing a concerted attack on the judicial system of the United States, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies immediately began intensive investigations of the bombings. The FBI designated the murders a major case, meaning they took priority over all other cases. In the Bureau most cases are referred to by a description number; major cases are given code names to facilitate communications. Because this case began with the murder of Judge Vance by a package bomb, it was known as VANPAC; it eventually became one of the most massive investigations in FBI history, a year-long manhunt that involved hundreds of agents. More than six thousand people were interviewed and millions of documents were examined. But the case was finally solved on the third floor of the FBI headquarters building in downtown Washington, D.C., in the finest crime lab in the world.