swallowed-exceptions

Is there a way to force JUnit to fail on ANY unchecked exception, even if swallowed

I am using JUnit to write some higher level tests for legacy code that does not have unit tests. Much of this code "swallows" a variety of unchecked exceptions like NullPointerExceptions (e.g., by just printing stack trace and returning null). Therefore the unit test can pass even through there is a cascade of disasters at various point...

Why do good programmers sometimes silently swallow exceptions?

I know it's evil, but I've seen swallowed exceptions in code written by a good programmer. So I'm wondering if this bad practice could have at least one positive point. In other words, it is bad but why do good programmers, on rare occasions, use it? try { //Some code } catch(Exception){} ...