Alfred Hightower had been on the run since 2007, when a warrant was issued for his arrest on drug-dealing charges. Hightower was apparently from Kokomo, Indiana, but had fled to Canada. His downfall, though, was that he spent a…
In 2007, Daniel Freitag got a speeding ticket in West Salem, Ohio. Patrolman Ken Roth said he had measured Freitag's speed with a radar gun, but that evidence was thrown out on appeal because the state had failed to provide…
In August, police in Framingham, Massachusetts, responded to a report that a gas station had been robbed. They brought along a tracking dog and released it in the direction in which witnesses said the robber had gone. Just a few…
The Chicago Tribune reports that judges in Cook County, Illinois, have been dismissing speeding tickets issued to drivers whose speed was measured with laser guns rather than boring old radar. The traffic court has taken the position that evidence gathered…
Here's an opinion by the Minnesota Court of Appeals that is unpublished, but should not go unread. Below are the first two sentences of the court's opinion – I have reversed the order for slightly greater comedic effect: Four teenage…
According to the people at Improbable Research, who collect interesting and completely ridiculous studies done in many scientific fields (including the social sciences), the longest known oath required of witnesses in a judicial proceeding was the oath required in Burmese…
This may seem at first like a great idea for beating those automatic photo-enforcement cameras they set up to catch speeders: I would honestly like to be able to say this idea worked and that there was still a mystery…
Welcome back to the case that poses the following legal questions, among others: Is it possible to have less than zero credibility, and What happens if both parties to a lawsuit suffer from that handicap? I think the answer to…
Serena Kozakura was convicted last year of property destruction, after a man accused her of kicking a hole in the door of his room so she could get inside. Since Kozakura is a well-known pin-up and bikini model in Japan,…
In a classic opinion of which I have just learned, the California Court of Appeal ruled in 1998 that police were in fact justified in detaining a man they saw on a bicycle at 3:00 in the morning, primarily because…