Lowering the Bar

Best Ruling of 2006?

The third category I'm putting up for a vote is the Judicial Ruling of the Year.  The nominees are:

Order Granting Motion to Compel Lunch (Judge Gaines, Maricopa County, AZ)

•     My favorite part of this is the directive to tip not less than twenty percent.

Opinion Dismissing Bunk-Bed Failure-to-Warn Litigation (N.J. App. Div.)

•     Important because of the deterrent effect on other warn-me-while-I-sleep litigation.

Order Directing Parties to Resolve Dispute by Rock-Paper-Scissors (Judge Presnell, M.D. Fla.)

•     Shouldn't entire cases be resolved this way?

Order Denying Motion as Incomprehensible (Judge Clark, W.D. Tex.)

•     Bonus points for citation to scene from "Billy Madison."

The voting for all three categories will remain open until January 31 sometime, and the winners announced, along with my own selections for top ten stories of 2006, on Friday.

Best Lawsuit of 2006?

I also want to honor the most compelling lawsuit of 2006.  It was particularly hard to choose between so many qualified contenders in this area, so I definitely wanted to put this to a vote.  (Note: these lawsuits are ones that I reported on during 2006.  They may have been filed, dismissed, or ruled upon during that year.  I'm still counting them for 2006.)

The nominees in this category are:

Gokey v. Lodi v. Gokey (the second case I know of where someone's basically sued himself)

Meckler v. Old Orchard Shopping Center (claiming mall was responsible for squirrel attack)

Heckard v. Jordan (plaintiff claimed he was sick of being mistaken for Michael Jordan)

Alamo v. Howard (a.k.a. Ninja v. Ninja v. Ninja's Grandmother)

Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine v. McDonald's (warning them not to cook meat)

It's a good year for bad lawsuits when you have to leave out a case I called "Defective Hairpiece Blamed for Cardiac Arrest" for lack of space.

Best Legal Argument of 2006?

As January 2007 comes to an end, so also does any excuse I might have for recapping the best stories of 2006.  I'll be doing that this week and am finishing up the review process.  It is very difficult to make some of these choices, and so in two or three categories I thought I would experiment with putting these to a vote.  Assuming this polling software works successfully, which is a big assumption, then the most popular choices will be announced by the end of the week.  If it doesn't work, I'll pick the ones I like and pretend they were the most popular choices.  If that system's good enough for the Electoral College, it's good enough for me.

The first category is Best Legal Argument of 2006.  This category honors creative and preferably ridiculous arguments that are especially clever, especially stupid, or somewhere in between.

The nominees are (links go to the original post):

Woman Argues She Can Use HOV/Carpool Lane Because She Is Pregnant

Accused Bigamist: "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas"

Man Believes Bad Checks May Have Been Written by His Other Personalities

Motion to Continue Arkansas Trial Because Deer Season is Comin' Up

Motion for Extension of Time Because My Dog Had Puppies

The poll buttons are in the sidebar to the right.

Embezzler Keeps Low Profile By Purchasing Ranch, Talking Trees, 20-Foot Dragon

According to prosecutors, Angela Platt embezzled almost $7 million from her employer over the past several years, using her job as a staff accountant to write herself larger and larger checks until eventually she was taking the money in $50,000 chunks.  Apparently no one missed the money or had any other suspicions until a newly hired assistant bookkeeper discovered the thefts in June 2006.

Those not having suspicions included Platt's husband and their neighbors and relatives, who found it not especially unusual that a staff accountant owned a 104-acre ranch, a house and five acres of land in Rhode Island, a fleet of cars, eight show horses, and, in an outstanding touch, a life-size statue of Al Capone.  Platt also decorated her property one Halloween with six "Wizard-of-Oz"-style talking trees (Hollywood-grade cinematic props that cost $3,000 each) and a 20-foot-tall dragon called "The Slayer," which had hydraulic wings, generated clouds of smoke and emitted a "booming dragon roar."  The cost of "The Slayer" was not reported.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office said that some friends or relatives did ask how Platt was able to afford everything, and that Platt told them she was the CEO of a corporation or that she had won the lottery.  The spokesperson did not say what Platt's husband thought about the expenditures or what company he thought she might be the CEO of.  I think most guys would be a little suspicious if their wives showed up in a new pair of shoes, let alone if they came home with a life-size statue of Al Capone tied to the top of the Audi.  But I guess if I knew I was going to end up with a 20-foot dragon to put in the middle of my home video-game  amphitheatre, I would not ask too many questions either.

Platt has agreed to plead guilty and should be spending about four years in prison under the plea deal.  She has paid about $2 million in restitution so far.

Link: AP via FindLaw.com

Brat's Screaming Ruled Proximate Cause of Chicken Tragedy

A court in Nanjing, China, has ruled that a man must compensate a local chicken farmer for hundreds of chickens allegedly killed by the man's four-year-old son.  The man was making a delivery to the farm when his son, who had gone with him, probably now for the last time, was scared by a barking dog.  The dog scared the boy, the boy began screaming, the screaming scared the chickens, 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear, and thousands of future law students are now stuck with yet another freaky causation hypothetical.

The Nanjing court found that the boy's screaming was the "only unexpected abnormal sound" that could have caused the chicken stampede, and ordered his father to pay 1,800 yuan, about $230.  Apparently a chicken's life is worth no more than fifty-two cents on the mean streets of Nanjing's chicken farms.

Link: Yahoo! News

Iraqi Parliament Actually Has a Quorum on Monday

Further proof today that things are going great in Iraq -- the New York Times reports that on Monday, the parliament was actually able to conduct business because, for the first time since November, enough people showed up to vote on things.  The report said that almost every session since then has simply been adjourned because as few as 65 of the 275 members could or would show up for work.  Monday was a big day, then, because "attendance actually surpassed the 50 percent plus one needed to pass laws."

And that was because our buddy Moktada al-Sadr let his group show up.  The 30 members in that bunch returned from a months-long boycott, during which they were probably all taking glaring lessons from Moktada, and the news that they would be returning "created a public relations blitz" that ended up getting 189 of the 275 members to attend.  Whether the quorum would last long enough to get any work done was anybody's guess.

Many members do not even live in Iraq anymore, including Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister.  London is looking a lot better to him right now.  Another member, Adnan Pachachi, phoned in from Abu Dhabi to tell the Times that he had left to get some decent medical care for his wife.  He hoped to return in a few weeks.  "One has to be there," he admitted, to serve in Parliament.

Although members earn the equivalent of about $120,000, which is an awful lot of dinars these days, many still claimed that they were unable to make ends meet.  Pachachi, for example, said he can only afford 20 of the 40 guards he has to hire to protect him when he does come to Iraq.  (Good thing all the members don't show up, I guess, or else there wouldn't be any place for the guards to sit.)

The current speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, sympathized with the security concern.  He said Parliament should set aside more money for members' security, and that he thought members should come back to Iraq to vote for that.  He also argued that attendance would be improved by new bills that provide for fines and possible replacement of members who do not attend.  The bills that would help ensure a quorum could be passed as soon as there is a quorum to pass them.

Link: New York Times

Police in Tijuana Are No Longer Empty-Handed

The war on drugs continues to rage in Tijuana, Mexico, but police officers there are in a much better position to fight it now that they have been given weapons.

Although, since the weapons are slingshots, maybe their position is not all that much better.

Tijuana's 2,000 officers had guns up until January 5 of this year, when President Felipe Calderon ordered them all disarmed because of allegations that a corrupt network of police is working with drug traffickers.  3,300 soldiers and federal police were sent to Tijuana to carry out the order and to go after the gangs.  The guns are still being "inspected," and so in the meantime the local police force has been doing all its policing mano a mano.  This is probably especially fun since there were over 300 murders in Tijuana last year, including the killings of 13 police officers.

Upset with this development, about 100 officers demonstrated outside the town hall on Monday asking to get their guns back.  The government didn't agree, but did give them something almost as good -- slingshots, along with all the ball-bearings they could carry.  Even then, the government only gave out about 60 slingshots, and only to officers who patrol tourist areas.  Those should come in real handy if a tourist is being attacked by a feral cat.  But it is probably not lost on the brave officers of the Slingshot Squad that any actual criminals who might show up may well still have actual guns, and perhaps should not be pissed off by being shot with a ball bearing.

Oddly, the Wikipedia article on Tijuana does not say anything at all about a crime or drug problem.  The city's "reputation for violence has been blown out of proportion," says the article's unknown author, who I suspect may be an employee of the Mexican government, although I admit am basing this only on the article's clear focus on the more positive aspects of Tijuana, such as its cultural center, excellent universities, and wonderful restaurants, which the author states "have the best seleccion of food en the hole country."  So I'm only speculating.

Link: MSNBC.com

Perry Mason Summarized

This is the essay I was looking for.  James Lileks does a review of the new Perry Mason DVD box set and reminds you that you don't really need to get it because every show was basically the same.

Link: LILEKS.com

Liquor-Store-Robbery Highlight Reel

While looking for a story on Lileks.com, itself an excellent website, I came across this link to what is apparently a highlight reel edited together from security-camera footage of a guy robbing a liquor store.  Or trying to, anyway.  This is worth watching.  I especially liked the mini-montage at the end.

No sound, but that makes it better because you can imagine what an appropriate soundtrack might sound like.

Link: "badrobber" at Glumbert.com

Police Rapidly Crack the Case of the Stolen GPS Devices

Thieves stole 14 global positioning system devices from a New York public-works department on Monday night.  Police located them almost immediately.

My shortest post yet.

Link: AP via Yahoo! News