Lowering the Bar

Your Dog's Body Damaged My Car, Says Alleged Creep

"I have complete compassion for them," said Jeffery Ely about the family he sued after killing their dog.  Ely had been driving at night on January 4 when Nikki Munthe's dog, Fester, a miniature pinscher, ran out into the road and maliciously hurled his 13-pound body into the front of Ely's Honda Civic.

Ely later sued the Munthe family for about $1,100, which he said was the cost of fixing his bumper and radiator and the time he had to take off from work.

"I know how it feels," he said, not meaning how it feels to be struck and killed by a Honda Civic but rather how it feels to lose a beloved pet.  "I love dogs.  But once you get them, they are your responsibility."  He blamed the family for letting the dog off-leash.  (The family filed a countersuit.)

In January 2008, you may recall, Tomas Delgado dismissed a somewhat similar lawsuit that he filed against the family of a boy he had killed.  Delgado argued that the boy and his bike had negligently damaged the front of his Audi when he hit them, traveling somewhere around 90 mph on a rural highway at night.  Delgado agreed to drop that lawsuit after his attorney arrived at the courthouse for a hearing to find hundreds of local residents had also taken an interest in the matter, and that they were not Delgado supporters.

In the more civilized (but much less festive) environment of St. Louis County, Minnesota, the lawsuits were resolved by a judge rather than by an angry mob.  After emotional testimony by both sides on May 10, Judge Gerald Maher dismissed both lawsuits, saying there was no proof anyone had been negligent.  (It turned out the leash law did not apply partly because the family lived outside city limits.)  "You don't have a legal cause of action," Judge Maher said, though it's unclear if he said it to one or both sides.  "You never should have been here."

They had planned to be on TV instead, apparently -- the parties had agreed to appear on "Judge Joe Brown" to settle the matter, but that seems to have fallen through.  Ely told the Duluth News Tribune that nationwide coverage of the matter had "ruined his reputation," although his willingness to appear (and probably lose) on national TV drops that down a bit on the sympathy scale.

According to local sources, Ely has since fixed his radiator himself, for about $120.

Link: CBS News
Link: Duluth News Tribune

Firearms Instructor Teaches Students to Unload Guns Used for Firearms Instruction

Accounts differed of the incident on May 3 in which Dave Hansen, police chief of Riverdale, Utah, managed to shoot himself while teaching a gun-safety class. Two of Hansen's students, Bart Ulm and Lewis Walker, claimed they had been concerned at the time that Chief Hansen was being careless, partly because they say they noticed there was live ammo in the gun Hansen was using for demonstration purposes.

"I was very leery," said Ulm, "because there's no need to have live ammo in a gun in the class. But I figured he's the chief, so he must know what he's doing."  And he did, if what he was doing was trying to shoot himself in the ankle.  The pistol went off while Hansen was preparing to disassemble it.

"I'm hit!" Hansen cried, and fell over.  The students, according to the AP report, then began to shout "Officer down!" as they had presumably seen on TV.  Eventually someone thought to call 911, which is less dramatic but more helpful.  Hansen was treated and released two days later.

Another officer told the local newspaper that an internal investigation into the matter was proceeding.  He disputed the accounts given by Ulm and Walker, who he described as "disgruntled."  It was not clear how their disgruntlement would explain the bullet in Hansen's ankle, however.

This is not as good as the last gun-safety-instructor-shoots-self-in-foot story I came across, because that shooter started off by bragging about his professionalism, the incident was videotaped, and he later sued his employer (the DEA) for allegedly leaking the video to the Internet.  But you can't ask for facts like that every time.

Link: AP via SF Gate.com

More Lessons in Avoiding Jury Duty

Thankfully, the Chicago Tribune is providing "gavel-to-gavel" coverage of the R. Kelly trial in Cook County, and though this trial will probably teach us many important lessons, the first of them has to do with jury service.

Reporter Stacy St. Clair writes today (May 15) that she has already learned "12 ways to get kicked out of the jury pool."  Some of these we already know, but others are more intriguing, for example:

• Suggesting (especially given the facts of the R. Kelly case) that the age of consent should be lowered to puberty, as "nature" intended;
• Pausing for a sufficiently long period of time after being asked if you could give the defendant a fair trial;
• Praising the defendant, such as by calling him a "musical genius."  (Asked to come up with something negative about R., this potential juror could only say, "Um, he and Jay-Z don't get along?")
• Stating, in what was called a "perfectly worded response," that "I believe Mr. Kelly is guilty of the charges due to what I have read in the papers, and the fact that he was indicted by the grand jury further validates my beliefs."  Not coincidentally, this potential juror is a legal secretary.
• Best: combining the suggestion that you would never convict with a reference to 9-11: "R. Kelly may have led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11, but you can't prove it."  Well, I could if I had it on film, I think.

All of the above happened during just one day of voir dire, during which not a single potential juror was chosen for the panel.

Link: Chicago Tribune

Man Who Attacked Founder of Jedi Church Gets Suspended Sentence

After a hearing on May 14, 27-year-old Arwel Hughes was sentenced to two months in jail (suspended), a light punishment for one who turned to the Dark Side.  Hughes was arrested in March after he assaulted Barney and Michael Jones, two cousins who founded a chapter of the Jedi Church in Wales last year.

According to the article, in the 2001 UK census nearly 400,000 people listed "Jedi" as their religion.

Prosecutors told the Holyhead Magistrates' Court that Hughes, who is not a church member, attacked the two men in their front yard while they were engaged in a "light saber battle."  Hughes, who was wielding a metal crutch and wearing a trash bag as a cape, hit one Jedi on the head and the other in the leg.  He shouted "Darth Vader!" as he attacked.

In court on May 13, Hughes said he could not remember the incident because he was drunk at the time.  According to the report, Hughes had "drunk the better part of a 2 1/2 gallon (10-liter) box of wine beforehand."  That seems doubtful; the average yearly consumption of wine in Britain (for 2005) was about 27 liters -- maybe they try harder in Wales, but still I think that much wine "beforehand" might have been fatal.  Dangerous it is to drink so much until finished your Jedi training you have.

Drunk and stupid is not a defense, at least in this country, but Hughes' lawyer ran with it.  "[My client] knows his behavior was wrong and didn't want it to happen," she told the court, "but he has no recollection of it."  (Apparently he blacked out just after realizing something was about to happen that he would regret later.)  Luckily for Darth Hughes, no one was seriously injured, so he got away with a suspended sentence and about $500 in fines.

Link: CBS News

JetBlue Sued by Man Forced to Ride in Lavatory

Numerous sources reported recently on a lawsuit filed by Gokhan Mutlu, a gentleman who alleges that Jet Blue employees deprived him of his original seat during a cross-country flight and forced him to use the lavatory toilet seat instead.

Pro: more privacy, personal sink, no waiting to use the lavatory.  Con: seat doesn't recline, generally not equipped with seat belts.

The plaintiff alleges that he was flying JetBlue on a "buddy pass," a voucher that employees can get for their buddies.  These allow you to fly on standby and apparently for free, but it seems they also put you at the very bottom of the airline-passenger totem pole.  Mutlu, who was trying to get to New York, says he was first told that a off-duty flight attendant had taken the last seat on the plane, but then that she would sit in the employee "jump seat," leaving a regular seat open for him.

But, he alleges, about 90 minutes into the five-hour flight, the flight attendant decided the jump seat was uncomfortable, and the pilot told Mutlu he would have to move.  He could not take the jump seat, however, because that was reserved for employees.  And since, unfortunately, you can't sit on the captain's lap anymore, that left only one seat on the plane, one that is even less comfortable than a jump seat, at least for long periods of time.

Mutlu alleges that when he "expressed reluctance" to sit in the bathroom, the pilot told him that "he was the pilot, that this was his plane, under his command [and] that [Mutlu] should be grateful for being on board."  (The pilot was not named in the complaint, which reinforces my main question about the lawsuit, namely that even on JetBlue pilots typically do not get directly involved with seat assignments.)  Plaintiff then reluctantly entered the chamber and took his precarious seat.

Later, there was turbulence.

Now, it does sound like this guy got jerked around, and being required to ride in the lavatory would not be pleasant.  If this actually happened, I would support his claim to get some kind of compensation.  But public sympathy for him has been a bit muted, possibly because he is demanding over TWO MILLION DOLLARS for his three-hour ordeal.

As it happens, just the other day I was figuring out, in a meeting about a case in which the demand is very large (I have to do something during meetings and it turns out doodling is too obvious) how much money one might earn during one's entire lifetime. Assuming that you made $50,000 a year on average during a working life that spanned forty years (the numbers I was actually using), you would earn, coincidentally, TWO MILLION DOLLARS, pre-tax.  That is probably somewhere in the ballpark for the actual numbers -- the IRS has apparently just stated that the U.S. median gross income for 2007 was $61,500, more than the number I used; but one study I found estimated the median lifetime income of a sample of retirees during the time they worked from ages 35-60, adjusted for 2005 dollars, to be just $517,158.

My point being that this guy (and/or his lawyer) is demanding more than the entire lifetime economic output of most Americans as compensation for being required to sit on the toilet for about three hours.

I had a roommate that used to do that for free.

Link: CBS News
Link: TaxProf Blog (recent median income statistics)

Judge Finds Alleged Indian Tribe to Be "Complete Sham"

On May 6, a federal judge in Utah ruled that a group calling itself the "Wampanoag Nation" was not a branch of the recognized Native American tribe of that name, but instead was a sham organization set up to further a variety of extortion and fraud schemes.

The court noted that the Wampanoag Tribe is a federally recognized tribe that has been present in what is now southeastern New England since before the Pilgrims came to America.

Historical Range of the Wampanoag Tribe

It should therefore be distinguished, the judge said, from the Wampanoag Nation, which was founded in an Arby's restaurant in Provo in 2003.

Historical Range of the Wampanoag Nation

According to Judge Stephen Friot, the three members of the Wampanoag Nation, along with another man, who for some reason (probably late getting to Arby's) was not initiated into the tribe, used the sham tribe as a vehicle to file phony and harassing judgments against various local officials.  One of the men went too far when he sued numerous officials in 2004 claiming that his truck should not have been impounded after a traffic stop because it was an "Indian-licensed vehicle."  Oh no it isn't, said county attorneys, who filed a counter-suit alleging civil RICO violations.  Judge Friot ruled in favor of the county after a two-day trial.  He awarded $63,000 in damages, and ordered the bogus judgments set aside.

The defendants blamed the judge's decision on a failure to appreciate the intricacies of tribal politics.  According to Martin Campbell -- or "Spirit Walker," to use his Arby's name --  he and James Burbank had been unfairly linked with Dale Stevens, who Campbell said was actually a member of a tribal splinter group.  (That is, there had apparently been a falling-out among the three members of the tribe.)  "There's two individual groups here," said Campbell, who claimed that he and Burbank had "dismissed" Stevens from the Wampanoag Nation in 2005, and that Stevens was to blame for everything.  "We have nothing to do with Dale Stevens," Campbell insisted, "yet he keeps dragging us into this mess."  Nor, Campbell said, is either group affiliated with the outsider, Thomas Smith, who was described as head of an organization called the Western Arbitration Council and also as "presiding patriarch of the Order of the White Light."

The four defendants, who I will now refer to as the "Rico Tribe," could also face federal criminal charges.  If convicted, this proud people could be driven from their ancestral hunting ground, its roast beef and curly fries forever lost to them.

Link: Deseret News (Salt Lake)

Knife-Purchasers Must Register, Says Chinese Government

China's Ministry of Public Security, in full public-securing mode as the Olympic Games approach, has told citizens that anyone buying "potentially deadly knives" must now register with the state.  According to the government, "potentially deadly knives" include switchblades, knives with "blood grooves," and any knife with a blade measuring over 22 centimeters (8.66 inches) in length.

As you know, it is impossible to be killed by any blade measuring 8.65 inches or less.

As I mentioned in 2005, when we were discussing a proposal by some British medical experts that would have made pointy knives illegal, knife-control regulation goes back at least to the 17th century, when Louis XIV ordered that all knives in France be blunted in order to reduce violence.  As his grandson learned, a sharp point is not the only part of a blade that can be dangerous, but this idea still continues to come up now and then.

The Chinese government stated that regulations concerning any "knife tools" used by ethnic minority groups would be left up to "local autonomous governments," which might be a sign of a renewed commitment to civil rights if there actually were any local autonomous governments inside China.

Link:  Xinhua News Agency via Reuters