H. Beatty Chadwick, 72, is approaching his 14th consecutive year behind bars, though he has not been charged with a crime. In a 1995 divorce hearing, a judge thought Chadwick was lying about $2.5 million in assets (his wife said he was hiding them; he said he lost them in a business deal) and locked him up for contempt of court, and he has been there ever since. News of the Weird first mentioned him in 2002, when he was closing in on the American record for contempt of court, which he now holds. Chadwick has never wavered in his story, and after an independent retired judge investigated in 2004 and failed to find any money, Chadwick's lawyer compared the "missing" money to Saddam Hussein's "missing" weapons of mass destruction (and also pointed to some Pennsylvania murderers who do less time than Chadwick has).
Justice Run Amok
Extreme Behavior
In December, a court in Seoul, South Korea, fined the parents of a teenage rapist the equivalent of about $60,000 for their negligence in raising the boy badly. (The 18-year-old himself is serving a 10-year sentence for the crime.)
By a 2-1 vote, a Florida appeals court ruled in December that Andrew Craissati could stop paying alimony to his ex-wife. The couple's agreement called for alimony only until she remarried or was "cohabit(ing)" with another person for at least three months, and Craissati pointed out that his ex-wife, recently convicted of a serious DUI offense, is now "cohabiting" with a cellmate in prison.
More Fine Points of European Law: In November, Sweden's Social Insurance Agency stopped Jessica Andersson's disability payments despite her lingering back pain from a work-related accident six years ago; a doctor found that Andersson's back pain would subside, enabling her to return to work, if only she underwent breast-reduction surgery.
A Houston Chronicle investigation revealed in November that Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to act against 75 percent of all self-identified illegal aliens convicted of local crimes in the Houston area recently, including immigrants who had committed felonies ranging up to sexual assault of a child and even capital murder. After ICE declined to hold them, that 75 percent were simply released back into the community. Nationally, during that same approximate time period, ICE was deporting twice as many illegal aliens with clean records (clean, except for being undocumented) as those with criminal rap sheets.
In November, Michigan state circuit court judge Robert Colombo Jr. almost single-handedly quashed thousands of apparently bogus lawsuits for asbestos-related injuries by exposing the principal examining doctor as unqualified. Dr. Michael Kelly had diagnosed injuries on 7,323 patients' x-rays over 15 years (earning $500 per screening), which in one sampling was 58 times the abnormality-detection rate of independent radiologists. Judge Colombo found that Kelly is neither a radiologist nor a pulmonologist, had failed the certification test for reading x-rays, and performed lung-function tests improperly 90 percent of the time. On the day Judge Colombo commenced the investigation of Dr. Kelly, plaintiffs' attorneys, realizing they had been busted, promptly withdrew all of their lawsuits except one.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33]
[34]
[35]
[36]
[37]
[38]
[39]
[40]
[41]
[42]
[43]
[44]
[45]
[46]
[47]
[48]
[49]
[50]
[51]
[52]
[53]
[54]
[55]
[56]
[57]
[58]
[59]
[60]
[61]
[62]
[63]
[64]
[65]
[66]
[67]
[68]
[69]
[70]
[71]
[72]
[73]
[74]
[75]
[76]
[77]
[78]
Operation Repo
The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest
Inside American Jail
This feature may not be reproduced or distributed electronically, in print or otherwise without the written permission of uclick and Universal Press Syndicate.
© 2009 Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. A Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
truTV.com is part of the Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network. Terms & Privacy guidelines