No coupons needed: In May, in the latest blooming of the lawyers’ class-action money tree, California law firms asked a court to approve $258 million in fees for their handling of a lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., amounting to $3,000 an hour for the lead attorney (who billed for 6,000 hours of his own time, even though three dozen lawyers from more than 30 firms had a piece of the case), and $1,000 an hour for administrative work, all for the following consumer bonanza: Each victim will get a coupon worth $5 to $29 toward the purchase of another Microsoft product (coupons that are often routinely ignored by consumers in these settlements as not worth the bother).
Finer points of the law: In April, a judge in Ocala, Fla., sentenced a 27-year-old man only to probation for having sex with his then-girlfriend’s Rottweiler (with the man admitting that he had a “lifelong problem”) and lamented that under state law, the man could not be forced to register as a sex offender since the victim was a dog. Also in April, authorities in Nashville, Tenn., charged Metro News with violating the state’s Sunday-closing law for adult businesses, but the owner said he would fight it since he had recently tried to avoid the law by occupying most of his floor space with a Sunday-law-acceptable retail furniture and garden business (although his sign still said customers had to be 18 or older to shop for furniture).
Can’t possibly be true: Until March, Mr. Dayn Riegel and his girlfriend kept 77 cats in their house in Lawrenceville, Ga., but a Humane Society spokesman said he saw no problem, in that all appeared to be in good health and well-fed, and Riegel’s home was clean (though filled with litter boxes). Riegel recorded each cat’s history on a computer database, provided one packaged meal and one special meal a day for each, and turned more than 60 pounds of cat litter a week. (During a recent move from the home, Riegel gave away just a few of the cats.) Veteran schoolteacher Carrie Peoples, 63, quit her job in April in Covington, Ga., after an incident in which she responded to a trash-talking 14-year-old student by ordering two male classmates to toss the girl out of an open window (even though it was a first-floor window); the boys dutifully complied, for fear of punishment. And two-year teacher Jason Schoenberger, 24, was suspended from PS 279 in Brooklyn, N.Y., in March after he hung a 5-year-old student on a closet coatrack (supposedly with the kid’s permission) just to see the shock on a colleague’s face when he walked into the closet.
The Boston Herald reported in April that the Massachusetts Treatment Center, at which the state’s pedophiles and rapists are housed, was using a controversial aversion therapy that some experts say includes providing convict/patients with illegal child pornography and forcing them to masturbate repeatedly, past the threshold of pain, in the belief that child images will thus eventually become uninviting.
Politicians with real issues: New Hampshire state Rep. John Kerns resigned in February while on the verge of expulsion for, among other things, writing “State of New Hampshire” on some personal checks (later dishonored) to feign officiality, and for threatening violence after unsuccessfully demanding a private parking space. He appeared at one court hearing wearing a black cape to, as he said, improve his credibility as a defendant. Also, presidential candidate Robert Haines, 57, of New Hampshire, was arrested while campaigning in Virginia in April after he threatened to kill a police dog over a parking ticket dispute; last year, at a Dartmouth College football game, Haines tried to commandeer the public address system and ceremonially “throw out the first football” (which is only done in baseball).
Least competent criminals: A man, perhaps not all that incompetent, took $180 from another man in a home robbery in Covington, Ky., in April. The money was handed over by the victim only because he was late in noticing that the gun the man was holding had no barrel. As the robber ran out, the victim called police, and neighbors joined in a search, but the only things found nearby, according to the Kentucky Post, were discarded clothing and “pieces of a gun.”
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2004.
