Colleagues described him this way: "great synthesizer," "big heart, big convictions," reliable.
Smith told me, "I have two big convictions: one is environmentalism, and the other is that war is bad".
With other big convictions, the prosecutor, David N. Kelley, has said even less, often remaining quietly in his office.
"Each one of these big convictions does sort of chip away at the culture, I guess," said Cindi Canary, who founded the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.
"One of my big convictions is that the difference between a machine and a robot is the emotional reaction that you can elaborate with humans," event organiser Bruno Bonnell says.
That case was the first of the "big fish" convictions long demanded by the European Union, which placed Romania's feeble judicial system under a special regime of scrutiny in 2007.
The criminal justice system was about to enter years of agony and wrenching change as police wrongdoing was exposed, especially in the obtaining of confessions, and big terrorist convictions were overturned.
Everyone knows about the big cases: the conviction and exile of Roman Polanski, the (denied and unproven) accusation of Woody Allen.
But the explosion in the number of dogs, the rise in the number of big dogs, the conviction of many owners that their dogs are entitled to "off-leash experiences" in city parks -- all that expresses the suburban ideal of a dog in the yard.
And our consistent insistence that we are busy has created a host of personal and social ills--unnecessary stress, exhaustion, bad decision-making, and, on a bigger level, a conviction that the ideal worker is one who is available at all times because he or she is grateful to be 'busy.'".
