truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

The Sun reported in September that officials at London's Holloway Prison had recently staged a morale-boosting costume dance party for female inmates, even though Holloway houses Britain's worst female murderers. As a result, families of murder victims learned that the killers had a jolly good time dressed up as, for example, vampires and ghouls covered with fake blood.

The incredibly patient Joseph Shepard Sr., 53, sat quietly in St. Louis-area lockups for more than two years expecting that his lawyer, Michael Kelly, was working for his release on bond, but it turns out neither Kelly nor prosecutors nor the judge was doing anything at all. In fact, Shepard seemed innocently happy when a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter told him in August that he had looked into the case himself and that Shepard would be released soon. Shepard's attitude: "If I just sit here long enough, something's going to happen." Three days later, federal judge Carol Jackson released Shepard and chastised Kelly. (Shepard's drug charges remain.)

Jose Rivera, 22, survived two tours in Iraq, but back home in California, he took a job at the high-security Atwater federal prison, where officers cannot carry even non-lethal crowd-control weapons, and Rivera was murdered 10 months later by two inmates armed with handmade shivs. "Every single inmate in there is armed to the teeth for his own protection," complained one officer, but a Bureau of Prisons spokesman told CNN in August that "communication" with inmates is a better policy than even modestly arming guards.

Ian Brady, now age 70 and perhaps the most famous British murderer of the 20th century, complained recently that the psychiatric inmates housed with him in Ashworth Hospital still qualify for government allowances up to the equivalent of about $200 per week whereas prison transfers like him receive "only" one-fourth that amount.

Kenneth Moore, 49, admitted that he was the one who shot his friend Darrel Benner to death in 1995 during a beer-drinking binge, in front of two witnesses, in Piketon, Ohio, but an appeals court later ruled that he was entitled to a new trial because prosecutors had withheld evidence. At a new trial, with memories failing, Moore was found not guilty. State law thus calls Moore's nine-plus years served "wrongful imprisonment," entitling him to compensation, and in July the Ohio Court of Claims approved a payment of more than $500,000 (plus legal fees) for Moore's having pulled the trigger that night.

In July, convicted sexual molester Donald Fox, 62, of Frederick, Md., became the most recent convict to challenge the unfairness of his sentence (40 years in prison) and then have the appeals court agree it was unfair, except because it was too short (he's now serving 80 years).