There is an important decision out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit where the conviction of Laval Farmer was overturned due to the prosecutors’ repeated use of his nickname “murder.” After all, his nickname is not “Attempted Murder” Farmer, which is what he was tried for. My only regret is that he was not represented by Richard “Racehorse” Haynes so that the prosecutors could have told the jury not to let “a race horse clear murder.”
Continue reading “Murder, She Spoke: Court Overturns Convictions Due to Prosecutors Use of Defendant’s Nickname “Murder””
Category: Bizarre
School officials in Newark, Delaware have given the nation another example of mindless “zero-tolerance” abuse. In this case, officials suspended 6-year-old Zachary Christie because the boy brought his new cub scout camping utensils to school to eat his lunch. Because the utensil had a small knife, he was suspended and ordered to spend the next 45 days in the district’s reform school.
Continue reading “School Suspends Six-Year-Old For Bringing Cub Scout Kit to School”
Nicolas Cage has been hit by a lien for over $6,257,005 in unpaid income tax for 2007. It is not known if the IRS has started digging near Mount Rushmore.
Continue reading “National Treasure: Nicolas Cage Owes IRS Over $6 Million”
Richard Strandlof lived a life of distinction. He spoke to children and the media as a survivor first of the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 and then survived a roadside bomb that killed four fellow Marines. He will now add a further distinction as a defendant in a rare “stolen valor” prosecution after his claims of service were proven false.
It appears that when I suggested Woody Allen was the last person Polanski who want as an advocate (here), I spoke too hastily. As the French continue their campaign to force the return of Roman Polanski to their country (and avoid extradition to the United States for his rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1997), a new controversy has emerged from the Sarkozy government. The culture minister advocating for the famed director is the nephew of the late Socialist French president Francois Mitterand — Frédéric Mitterrand. Mitterrand appears to have more than a platonic interest in the underlying controversy.
This week, the Catoosa County School Board in Ringgold, Georgia will meet on controversy over the cheerleaders of Georgia’s Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School who use Biblical verses as part of their displays to root for the football team to “commit to the Lord” and “take courage and do it.”
Continue reading “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Post of Life: School Board to Meet on Christian Cheerleader Controversy”
Adam Jay Manning of Bountiful, Utah is not exactly going to be picked as Daddy of the Year. Indeed, when his kid asks where Manning was when he was born, he will be able to proudly state “I was in jail for groping the delivery nurse.”
Given our earlier story of how English parents are no longer allowed to buy alcohol with their teenagers present at the store, this may be a bit of a mixed message. A study has concluded that parents should supply alcohol to their teenagers at home rather than have them venture out for more dangerous liaisons. The researchers propose a weekly alcohol allowance for teens.
Continue reading “Teen Happy Hours: Study Proposes a Weekly Alcohol Allowance for the Children”
Brian T. Dykes, 21, and Mindy K. McGhee, 24, took the “something borrowed, something blue” thing a bit too literally. Hours after their marriage in Sevierville, Tennessee, they returned to the Angel’s View Wedding Chapel at the Black Bear Ridge Resort to burglarize it. They spent their honeymoon in separate cells.
Continue reading “Something Borrowed . . . : Tennessee Couple Spends Honeymoon in Jail After Burglarizing Wedding Chapel Where They Were Married”
Iraq war veteran Corporal Matthew Millington, 31, of the Queen’s Royal Lancers, thought that he had beaten the odds when he was told that the hospital had located two new lungs for transplant after his lungs were destroyed by an incurable lung condition. However, instead of dying of the original condition, he died of lung cancer. The two lungs transplanted in his body came from a smoker who had a habit of 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day. Millington who served in the army since his 16th birthday told his wife, “They’ve given me a dud pair” before he died of lung cancer in February.
Continue reading ““A Dud Pair”: Iraq Veteran Dies After Cancerous Lungs Are Used for Transplant”
Many of us have felt like this at work.
Continue reading “Dog Versus Sprinkler”
Texas parents are complaining that a program to distribute free Gideon Bibles at schools may have backfired. So many Bibles were distributed to students in Plano and Frisco that students reportedly began to use them as weapons, sold them, or even uses the pages to roll joints. In one particularly disturbing account, a Jewish boy was attacked by Christian students throwing the bibles at him.
Continue reading “Bible Battles: Students Use Free Gideon Bibles in Texas Schools to Beat Jewish Students and Roll Joints”
There is an interesting potential torts case out of Arizona where two people died and 19 people were injured as part of a “sweatbox” ceremony reportedly led by James Arthur Ray, author of the best-selling book “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want.”
Continue reading “Spiritual Searing: Two Die and Nineteen Injured in New Age “Sweatbox” Ceremony”
We have another case of a child dying from a relatively minor condition while surrounded by praying adults. Kent Schaible, 2, died of bacterial pneumonia because the parents Herbert and Catherine Schaible believed in faith-healing and declined to get medical attention for the child in Philadelphia. This is strikingly similar to the case of Leilani and Dale Neumann in Wisconsin who were recently given light sentences in such a faith-based case. As shown below, difficult questions are raised by the disparate treatment given parents who neglect children for religious as opposed to non-religious reasons. Continue reading “The Good Faith Defense: Parents Given More Lenient Treatment When Children Die in Faith-Based Neglect”
Management consultant Jackie Slater is over fifty and wanted to buy two bottles of wine when she was stopped at a store counter in England. The Morrisons clerk told her that she could not purchase wine because she was accompanied by her 17-year-old daughter Emily. In a London library, Lorna Watts, 26, asked to borrow some scissors and was refused by a librarian who explained that she “might stab a member of staff”. These are stories from what many of our English cousins are calling the evolution of a “nanny state” where the government and companies dictate an ever-widening range of rules for citizens who are treated as little more than errant children.