Justice Run Amok: That Ain't Right

With no help from Verizon Wireless, law enforcement agencies managed to hunt down a disturbed, 62-year-old man sought in an 11-hour manhunt following a domestic violence call in Carrollton, Ohio, in May. Deputies had wanted to use the man's cell phone signal to locate him, but the company had shut off his service over an unpaid $20 bill and refused to turn it on, even for a few minutes, unless deputies paid the $20. The sheriff was reluctantly about to pay when deputies found the man.

Josko Risa finished second in the election for mayor of Prozolac, Croatia (pop. 4,500), and was in a run-off on May 31 because of (or despite) his campaign pledge of (roughly translated) "All for Me, Nothing for You" (or, "It is definitely going to be better for me, but will be the same for you"). (Run-off results from Croatia were not widely reported.)

When the tenant failed to pay $87,000 in rent in April and May on two townhouses and a retail property at Trump Plaza in New York City, the landlord did what Donald Trump would surely do: It began eviction proceedings. However, the tenant in this case is Donald Trump's Trump Corp., which leases the space from the current landlord, the Trump Plaza Owners co-op. Said the co-op president: "If you don't pay the rent when Donald Trump is your landlord, he comes down on you like a hammer. Well, lo and behold...."

Also about to be discharged solely for being gay is Army infantry officer Daniel Choi, a West Point graduate and Arabic speaker, who would be (based on a 2005 Government Accounting Office report) at least the 56th gay Arabic linguist to be dismissed from the U.S. military since the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

As the U.S. House of Representatives was voting on legislation in April to expand the protections of hate-crimes law to "gender identity" and sexual orientation, Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida publicly ridiculed a colleague (unnamed) who apparently confused homosexuals with fetishists. The colleague had proposed an amendment specifying that protection of the law would not extend to exhibitionists, pedophiles or voyeurs, as well as "apotemnophiliacs, asphyxophiliacs, autogynephiliacs, coprophiliacs, klismaphiliacs" or people who practice something called "toucherism." (The amendment failed; thus, there is, for example, no enhanced penalty for assaulting a toucherist.)

When courts in Nashville, Tenn., get too backed up, a local tradition allows judges to appoint well-known local attorneys to act as "special judges" to help clear dockets. According to a months-long investigation by WTVF-TV, broadcast in April, it appears that at least some of the "special judges" used their power largely to dismiss speeding tickets, including at least one instance of a lawyer's dismissing his own client's ticket. The station found that of almost 1,800 speeding tickets dismissed by courts during the time investigated, 1,300 were by the "special judges."

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