Michelle Cossey pleaded guilty to one count of child endangerment in September in Norristown, Pa., admitting that she had bought her son Dillon, 14, a rifle and gunpowder (which prosecutors say Dillon was planning to use in a Columbine-style attack on former classmates at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School). Michelle said she had no idea of his plans, but only wanted to help boost Dillon's "self-esteem," since he is severely overweight and had left school after the seventh-grade because of bullying.
Justice Run Amok
Extreme Behavior
Most workers who have retired in the last few years from New York's Long Island Rail Road have also qualified for disability payments (though most did not claim such disabilities while working), according to a September New York Times investigation of state records. Lax union work rules, plus the astonishingly cooperative "Railroad Retirement Board" (which virtually never rejects a disability application), have resulted in nearly every worker drawing about as much money in retirement as he made on the job. In October, the Times also discovered that many of the same retirees were apparently so confident that their "disability" status would be approved that they also purchased private disability insurance to make retirement even more lucrative.
Murderers in the Money: Reggie Townsend, 29, serving 23 years in a Wisconsin prison for reckless homicide against an 11-year-old girl, won $295,000 from a jury in September as compensation for a two-month confinement with only a "wet, moldy and foul smelling" mattress to sleep on (about $4,900 per unpleasant night).
Many people believe Israelis have more important things to worry about these days, but the city government of Petah Tikva (a Tel Aviv suburb) became the latest municipality to implement a registry of dog DNA, to encourage owners to pick up after their pets in the city's streets and parks. Abandoned droppings will be analyzed and those dogs' owners punished.
The Nebraska legislature's new "safe haven" law for unwanted babies, like other states' laws, allows them to be dropped off anonymously at hospitals to discourage abortions (and neglect by unfit parents). However, unlike other states' laws, Nebraska's applies not just to infants, but "minors," because, said Sen. Tom White, "All children deserve our protection." In September, the first two non-infants were abandoned, as exasperated parents gave up on rebellious sons aged 11 and 15, and critics say the law could apply to those up to age 19.
In September, the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the 18-year sentence of a 73-year-old South Bend man who had insisted that he was only trying to revive his 68-year-old wife after she became fatally incapacitated in June 2007. However, police noted that he had not called 911, nor checked her vital signs, nor performed CPR, but that instead, his "reviving" consisted of performing an oral sex act on her (which the judges concluded was merely the fulfillment of a desire that his wife had long since denied him).
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Operation Repo
The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest
Inside American Jail
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