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On this day, Dec. 23 …
1997: A federal jury in Denver convicts Terry Nichols of involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing, declining to find him guilty of murder. (Nichols would be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)
Also on this day:
- 1783: George Washington resigns as commander in chief of the Continental Army and retires to his home at Mount Vernon, Va.
- 1788: Maryland passes an act to cede an area "not exceeding ten miles square" for the seat of the national government; about 2/3 of the area would become the District of Columbia.
- 1805: Joseph Smith Jr., principal founder of the Mormon religious movement, is born in Sharon, Vt.
- 1913: The Federal Reserve System is created as President Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act.
- 1948: Former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and six other Japanese war leaders are executed in Tokyo.
- 1954: The first successful human kidney transplant takes place at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston as a surgical team removes a kidney from 23-year-old Ronald Herrick and implants it in Herrick’s twin brother, Richard.
- 1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson, on his way home from a visit to Australia and Southeast Asia, holds an unprecedented meeting with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican; during the two-hour conference, Johnson asks the pope for help in bringing a peaceful end to the Vietnam War.
- 1975: Richard S. Welch, the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Athens, is shot and killed outside his home by the militant group Nov. 17.
- 1986: The experimental airplane Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, completes the first nonstop, non-refueled, round-the-world flight as it returns safely to Edwards Air Force Base in California.
- 2003: The government announces the first suspected (later confirmed) case of mad cow disease in United States, in Washington state.
- Type of media: Image MalvoAP
- 2003: A jury in Chesapeake, Va., sentences teen sniper Lee Boyd Malvo to life in prison, sparing him the death penalty.
- 2003: New York Gov. George Pataki posthumously pardons comedian Lenny Bruce for his 1964 obscenity conviction.
- 2008: Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, founder of an investment fund that had lost $1.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, is discovered dead after committing suicide at his Madison Avenue office in New York City.
- 2013: The last two imprisoned members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot (Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova) are given amnesty and set free after spending nearly two years in prison for a protest at Moscow’s main cathedral.
- 2017: The top leadership of the Miss America Organization resigns amid a scandal over emails in which pageant officials ridiculed past winners over their appearance and intellect and speculated about their sex lives.
